What if republicans closed the e.p.a.

See next articles. The Opinion Pages. Has Gone Rogue. Republican candidates should work to rein in the E. What if Republicans Closed the E. Read More ». Related Discussions. The first year of his administration, E. Only a scandal involving one Anne Gorsuch Burford, the now forgotten administrator of the agency, prevented its wholesale dismantling just a decade after it was established by surprise!

Richard Nixon. Nixon had roared into Washington to cleanse the Augean stables to the cheers of conservatives hostile to big government. Alas, for their sake, he turned out to be a stealth happy regulator, helping establish, in addition to the E. Why was Nixon persuaded to establish the E. Like the leading lights of the progressive movement, he was appalled by government inefficiency.

The E. In the topsy-turvy world of G. The claim on behalf of one bill introduced this spring is that consolidating the departments of energy and the E. Few of the greenhouse skeptics, in fact, even broach fresh air at all, perhaps because they hail from states where it was never toxic. So the next time Michele Bachmann promises to dissolve the Nixon-created E. Decades earlier, Bachmann might have had trouble even finding the town through the eye-stinging, russet-brown air pollution filled with ozone, heavy metals, lead and other nasty byproducts of the California car culture.

After a quarter century battlng the-then Big Three Automakers to produce cleaner cars, California lobbied the federal government for the right to set stricter tailpipe-exhaust standards than the rest of the country, and that campaign later helped inspire formation of the EPA itself.

This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal. Unfortunately, the GOP pathological phobia of short-term costs explains a lot about the current state of the nation, from their shortsighted view of taxation and infrastructure investment, to their view of Wall Street regulation. Along with Krugman, I celebrate the new rules and hope they are a harbinger for a move to hold industry accountable for the real harm they do — to health and the economy.

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