The Obama administration chose to sacrifice lives and health for rather than risk perceived threats to commerce and jobs with increased regulatory burdens when he asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a plan to limit smog pollution. The plan was “projected to prevent 2,200 heart attacks and 23,000 asthma attacks annually.” Polluters won over environmentalists but the question remains can we keep the environment we all depend upon healthy and still have a robust economy. John Walke, the Clean Air Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Dr. Roger McClellan, adjunct professor at the Duke University Medical Center and past chairman of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee debate the issue.
The SF Chronicle weighs in on Obama’s capitulation to what appears to be a US Chamber of Commerce led campaign toward de-regulation.
The antiregulation campaign joins deficit reduction as the foundation of the Republican economic program.
The campaign is heavily backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and small business groups that contend regulations are destroying jobs. It follows more than a year of intense verbal attacks launched by Republicans in the House against everything from the Endangered Species Act to new rules on light bulbs.
Obama will announce his jobs plan Thursday in an address to Congress. It is expected to lean heavily on new infrastructure spending and to include extending a temporary payroll tax cut and perhaps including employers as well as employees.
Last week, the Obama administration retreated on new ozone regulations, saying they would cause “needless uncertainty.” Environmental groups were enraged. Obama has proposed streamlining existing rules but Republicans say that effort pales next to an edifice of new rules to implement health care and financial laws.
Environmental, consumer and labor groups say the Bush administration’s lax regulation led to the housing bubble and 2008 financial collapse, from which the economy is still struggling to recover.
When the chamber announced its campaign to reduce regulations in July 2010, “I thought to myself that it was preposterous, given that it was in the wake of the Wall Street crash, due to regulatory failures, the Massey mine disaster, due to regulatory failures, the BP gulf oil spill disaster, due to regulatory failures,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a liberal consumer group.
“But politically the chamber was right,” Weissman said. “Clearly it’s been taken up in a major way.”
This is why it is so scary having three Republicans with ties to the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce sitting on the Coos County Commission making decisions about our natural resources.
