Three months after voting to eliminate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) now says he’s outraged that the EPA isn’t doing more to protect the health of residents in his district. Barletta is insisting that the agency pay special attention to an area in Pittson, PA, after one resident alleged that a tunnel near a Superfund site gave him cancer. The EPA held an open house and information session to address the concerns of residents in the area, but said it did not plan to conduct further testing. This outraged Barletta, who called their decision “unacceptable”:

On Wednesday, Barletta sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson asking the agency to perform additional testing in the Carroll/Mill Street neighborhood.[...]“Frankly, this is unacceptable. The EPA’s own Web site indicates that one of the agency’s primary reasons for existence is to ensure that ‘all Americans are protected from significant risks to human health and the environment where they live, learn and work.’”[...]

“I was surprised to hear an EPA official basically tell the residents of the Carroll/Mill neighborhood that they would not conduct soil and water testing to find answers. It is absolutely the EPA’s job, and I’m going to make sure that job is done. The residents are scared, and they deserve answers and peace of mind.”

That’s an ironic position for Barletta, considering how often he’s tried to prevent the EPA from doing its job. In February, Barletta voted with the rest of the Republican-controlled House for an amendment that slashed funding for the EPA. Republicans were retaliating against the agency for its efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), one of the authors of the amendment, said, “The era of EPA overstepping its authority by imposing over-burdensome and unnecessary regulations at the expense of American businesses is over.”

Barletta’s vote to gut funding for the EPA flew in the face of popular opinion in his own district. A survey by Public Policy Polling found that 70 percent of voters in Barletta’s 11th Congressional District opposed Barletta’s vote to block the EPA from setting limits for carbon dioxide pollution. Those opposed included 58 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans. Voters also opposed Barletta’s votes to “prevent the EPA from reducing arsenic, mercury and other toxic pollution from cement kilns, or from collecting any data about carbon and other pollutants.”

It’s pretty audacious to attack an agency for not doing enough mere months after attacking them for doing too much. Barletta should hope his constituents have short memories and forget his attempts to stop the EPA from upholding health standards that Republicans insisted were a “burden” to business.

The three worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise and ocean poisoning:  Hell and High Water.  But another impact “” far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog “” may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source “” if not the source “” of two of our biggest recent wars. As the NYT reported in 2009:

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FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate surveys a damaged fire station with a Joplin firefighter.

In response to the deadliest spring of climate disasters in decades, House Republicans are slashing billions from disaster preparedness programs, including support for firefighters. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee cut the successful Department of Energy clean car manufacturing loan program by $1.5 billion to add $1 billion to disaster relief. But they also slashed other parts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Homeland Security budget, including cuts of $1.5 billion from President Obama’s request for next year in firefighter assistance grants and state and local grants administered by FEMA.

During the markup, Reps. David Price (D-NC) and Steve LaTourette (R-IL) attempted to restore $460 million in funding for firefighter grants and $1.1 billion in state and local grants, but their amendment was defeated 20 to 27 by the Republican majority. Price blasted the decision to “decimate funding” for disaster preparedness:

One of the worst decisions was to decimate funding for almost every grant program for state and local preparedness. Providing a total of $1 billion for all State and Local Grants, or 65 percent below the request, and providing $350 million for Firefighter Assistance Grants, almost 50 percent below an already reduced request, breaks faith with the states and localities that depend on us as partners to secure our communities. These cuts will be doubly disruptive as many of our states and municipalities are being forced to slash their own budgets.

“In today’s environment,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said, according to CQ, “we can’t be subsidizing local governments to the extent we have.” Rogers did not recognize that today’s environment is growing more disastrous and dangerous because of coal and oil pollution. Parts of his district were declared a federal disaster area earlier this month because of catastrophic flooding.

I believe a blog should get a big shakeup every two or three years, so Climate Progress is due.  The change-over will occur this weekend.

On Tuesday, the new, improved Climate Progress will debut — fully integrated with my (big) sister blog, Think Progress, which itself is getting an extreme makeover.

Here are some details:

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BlueGreen and Apollo Alliances merge to strengthen green economy

Brazil does away with laws to protect large swathes of rainforest

Brazil’s powerful agricultural sector has scored a major victory, with the approval by the lower house of Congress of a reform that would open up some protected forests to cropland and ranchers.

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Bowing to Koch pressure, NJ governor announces plan to withdraw from Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

Christie:  “In the past I’ve always said that climate change is real and it’s impacting our state.  There’s undeniable data that CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing. This decade, average temperatures have been rising. Temperature changes are affecting weather patterns and our climate.

In order to to best deal with climate change you have to understand its causes….   I’ve taken the time to develop a better understanding of the role that humans play in global warming and what impact human activities has on our climate.  In the last few months, I’ve sat down with experts both inside the government and outside the administration in academia and other places to discuss the issue in depth….  When you have over 90% of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts….  We know enough to say that we are at least a part of the problem.  So looking forward we need to work to put policies in place that get at reducing those contributing factors.

And that’s why, People of New Jersey, I am withdrawing from the most successful regional climate initiative in the country, the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI.  You see, I don’t think the carbon pollution price in RGGI is high enough, and yet at the very same time I’m going to complain that it is a “gimmicky” program that is “nothing more than a tax on electricity.”  Sure it is a market-based “gimmick” Republicans once embraced to help lower pollution-reduction costs to businesses.  And sure RGGI revenues lower the state’s deficit and at the same bring clean energy and energy efficiency to you, which keeps your bills low.  But my new motto is climate science, true, climate action, Fuggedaboutit!

Okay, while he did say all that stuff on the science (video here), the previous paragraph is just my summary of what he said about RGGI.  Christie did in fact simultaneously complain that the CO2 price was too low and that RGGI was a “tax on electricity.”  The question is why did he do this.

One popular theory is that he has national political ambitions in the GOP.

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The struggles of families and businesses over the past seven years are linked directly to high profits for oil companies due to high energy price volatility. A new report from the Center for American Progress finds that families and businesses are exposed to massive price swings for the vast majority of their energy spending.  Brad Johnson has the story.

CAP Senior Fellow Christian E. Weller and Special Assistant for Economic Policy Jaryn Fields explain that these large price swings for gasoline and other energy prices make it even more difficult for families, businesses, and ultimately the entire American economy to plan for the future:

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Climate Progress is now on Facebook. Help build our community of people like you who are passionate about climate and energy issues — “like” us and pass the word onto your network of friends and colleagues.

Also, you can connect with us on Twitter and join the nearly 14,000 people who get a steady stream of updates on climate science, policy issues and development of clean energy technologies.  In addition to tweeting the CP headlines with shortened urls as articles are posted, like an old-fashioned news teletype, we’re going to do more direct tweeting, led by clean energy reporter Stephen Lacey.

And on May 31, Climate Progress will be unveiling a major new site redesign that will open up CP to a whole new set of readers while hopefully solving some of the problems folks have been having with comments, among other improvements.  More on that in the coming days.

Thanks for connecting!

NOTE:  I’m bringing this post back up for reasons that will become clear shortly.