by Brad Johnson, in a Think Progress Green cross-post
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), the top Koch Industries man in Congress, is continuing his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency and its mission to protect the public welfare from toxic polluters. Pompeo has introduced legislation (HR 2876) to kill the Environmental Justice Eco-Ambassador Program, a small graduate student internship program that deals with the connections between economic disparities, discrimination, and environmental health. According to Pompeo, the program is part of the Obama administration’s plot to “indoctrinate” students “to act as tools of this Administration’s radical policies“:
At a time when millions of Americans cannot find work and are saddled with record deficits and crippling environmental regulations, spending $6,000 of taxpayer money per student to act as tools of this Administration’s radical policies is clearly not acceptable — nor is it ever the role of the federal government to indoctrinate.
“The requirements outlined the EPA’s stated desire to recruit and hire, at taxpayer expense, only those college students who are ideologically in line with the Obama Administration’s radical environmental policies,” Pompeo claims.
But the “radical” requirements are simply as follows:
Applicants must have previously been involved and/or have a strong interest in environmental justice, social justice issues and/or environmental health disparities in an academic, volunteer and/ or employment setting.
Quite simply, Pompeo believes that justice is a radical ideology, based on willful ignorance of reality. Children living in poverty have higher exposure to toxic chemicals. Neighborhoods near toxic waste facilities are disproportionately minority and poor. Although this internship is a new program, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice was established under President George W. Bush, not President Obama.
Although Pompeo claims the federal government should never “indocrinate,” he is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which decrees that “human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization.”
Pompeo’s legislation would also forbid EPA spending on student “programs related to the study of greenhouse gas emissions.”
His bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Carter (R-TX), Gregg Harper (R-MS), and David McKinley (R-WV).
– Brad Johnson
JR: The poor and disenfranchised always suffer the most from environmental damage and have the least ability to avoid the harm or recover from it. This will obviously also be true for climate change, whose harm will be the greatest on the young (which includes students). And so the pollutocrats work overtime to crush efforts by those who suffer the most.
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“Quite simply, Pompeo believes that justice is a radical ideology, based on willful ignorance of reality. Children living in poverty have higher exposure to toxic chemicals. Neighborhoods near toxic waste facilities are disproportionately minority and poor.”
Why do you say that? He may know it perfectly well, but simply doesn’t care, which I think is more likely.
Hypocritical, and filled with lies, nonsense and subterfuge. I do hope the Congressman fully understands what climate change will do to Kansas within the short span of 10 years.
Not to bait the people in the American heartland- but do they have any idea what they will be facing in the years to come? Such abysmal arrogance and ignorance leave one breathless.
Ah yes, but there is irony in all of this. It’s part of the race-baiting strategy (shades of the smear of Van Jones as some ‘Green Panther’, which I think I’m going to trademark just in case Fox, Glenn Beck, etc. try and use it) of the Republican party perfected by the same Nixon who signed into law the Clean Air and Water acts which created the EPA.
Thanks for drawing this bill to our attention. I hope it goes nowhere.
The first few sentences of the draft are seductively fair, before the viciously exclusionary components about environmental justice and green house gases.
The subsequent section #4 requiring an extensive report is almost a witch hunt.
#4 requires a report from the EPA in 6 months of “existing policies, procedures, and actions taken within the last 3 years in recruiting and hiring applicants for all Environmental Protection Agency student programs.”
Student programs? What does that include, exclude? The EPA has many educational materials for classrooms, as well as the student internships. And over three years?
This looks like an Inquisition.
It’s not willful ignorance. Rather, it’s a manifestation of underlying GOP social darwinist ideology. The ideology mandates that all life is a struggle for survival and that the free market is the natural condition of people and it is the morally right state, regardless of whether people are suffering from pollution or dying from starvation.
Ziyu, I have concluded the same as you. GOP is fighting a covert and soon overt class war to squeeze completely out of society the “have nots” who cannot get into the country club unless they will work for slave wages.
Even though economists know that externalities (ordinary pollution and global warming) are subsidies and thus inefficient, wealthy people actually like them, because they get more of a subsidy than they give.
At least in the short run . . .
But yet it’s no problem for fossil fuel to hold pow wows with legislators for the express purpose of writing model legislation.
My head hurts.