ThinkProgress Logo

Climate Progress

Newt Versus Newt: Abolish EPA, Because It Gave Us A ‘Cleaner, Healthier Environment’

By Guest Blogger on Jul 12, 2011 at 6:14 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from Pella, Iowa.

In 1969, a river in Ohio caught on fire and the world watched as flames burned on a polluted body of water. The Cuyahoga conflagration caused only minor damages but ignited a public movement towards environmentalism which ultimately led to the passage of the Clean Water Act and the establishment of the EPA.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cited the incident as an example of poor stewardship of the environment during a campaign stop Monday with the FAMiLY LEADER Presidential Lecture Series in Pella, Iowa. After calling the EPA a “job-killing, anti-business, anti-local control, Washington-centered radical bureaucracy,” he touted the “common sense steps” taken to successfully clean up and revive the Cuyahoga River:

VANDER PLAATS: Brenda from Pella asks, “What are your views on the care of our creation? Specifically, how would you balance our need for natural resources with God’s command to care for the world?”

GINGRICH: I think that’s a very good question. I used to teach environmental studies. I love the outdoors. I wanted to either be a zoo director or a paleontologist when I was young. I have a real interest in the natural world.

But I’m also in favor of an Environmental Solutions Agency to replace the Environmental Protection Agency. The Environmental Protection Agency has become a job-killing, anti-business, anti-local control, Washington-centered radical bureaucracy. It’s fundamental. You talk to small towns all across Iowa about how much they’re going to be bankrupted by EPA regulations. You talk to farmers about how much EPA now makes no sense at all. I’m not a chemist by background, but the idea we should treat milk as gasoline makes no sense at all. Something happens to bureaucrats in Washington. Common sense leaves and dictatorship enters, and they issue rules that make no sense . . .

When I taught environmental studies, the Cuyahoga River was on fire in Cleveland. Now, I don’t care how conservative you are, you do not want rivers to be on fire. It’s a really bad sign of how much pollution there was. So the steps that we took were common sense that cleaned up the Cuyahoga River, that cleaned up all sorts of places around this country… those are the good steps. We have a cleaner, healthier environment today than we did in 1970.

Watch it:

Although he praises the “cleaner, healthier environment” created by the EPA, he wants to scrap the agency and now regularly attacks the agency for trying to enforce the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act for today’s pollution threats.

The Clean Water Act gave the EPA regulatory rights to monitor the amount of pollution that manufacturing companies dumped into the river. When regulations took effect in 1972, the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration found “no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes”. Today, EPA scientists have found 40 different species of fish. “The Clean Water Act made a big difference early in the effort to clean up the Cuyahoga,” said Jim White, director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization. “The federal government had the muscle to make things happen.”

For Gingrich, whose campaign has been defined by missteps, his approach to environmental issues rests somewhere between nonsensical and hypocritical.

-Aubrey Murray

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Why America Needs to Move Beyond Coal: Five Economic Indicators

By Stephen Lacey on Jul 12, 2011 at 6:10 pm

1. While coal prices become more volatile, natural gas prices appear more stable (and the cost of renewable energy is dropping fast).

2. The delivered price of coal increased three times faster than inflation over the past five years.

3. States dependent on coal had the highest electricity price increase in the past five years.

4. U.S. Coal mining productivity has declined 20% since 2000.

5. Rising international demand and recognition of environmental costs will continue to drive coal prices upward.

Coal still plays a dominant role in the U.S. energy mix, accounting for almost 45% of American electricity production. But the economics of coal continue to change, making the resource look far less attractive today than it once was.

Researchers, journalists and activist groups have been sounding the alarm about “Peak Coal” in recent years. A 2010 paper in the journal Energy concluded that the global coal industry had reached the limit to what it could technically and economically exploit. Another 2009 analysis from Clean Energy Action based on US Geological Survey data suggested showed that available coal reserves were not as abundant as widely thought:

Read more

Economy

Chamber Of Commerce Calls For More Foreclosures, No More Help For Homeowners

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:55 pm

Since the housing bubble burst, millions of families have been foreclosed upon and millions more have seen their mortgages sink underwater (meaning they now owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth), through no fault of their own. Continued foreclosure have been a drag on the economy for the last few years, pulling down home values and blighting neighborhoods.

The Obama administration has tried to implement anti-foreclosure programs (with extremely limited success). But according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, these efforts should come to an end, as the economy actually needs more foreclosures:

On the housing front, [U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom] Donohue struck a somewhat dire tone, arguing that more foreclosures need to occur before the housing market can turn around, and criticizing Washington efforts to provide relief.

“Through their actions over the last two decades, the politicians have already proved they can help royally mess up the housing sector,” he said. “Government should be smarter this time around and avoid the temptation to endlessly prop up those who, sadly, will never be able to afford the homes they are in now.”

Currently, one in five homeowners in the U.S. is underwater. At the current rate, it would take 103 months to “sell off all the foreclosed homes in banks’ possession, plus all the homes likely to end up there over the next couple years, at the current rate of sales.” That’s eight and a half years of backlog. Wall Street is not maintaining the properties it already owns, further dragging down the value of homes. More foreclosures and empty houses will do nothing to help the situation.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that “the Obama administration is ramping up talks on how to revive the housing market,” but has not decided on any specifics. Last week, President Obama hinted that the White House is working on ways to apply more pressure on banks, pushing them to reduce loan amounts for troubled borrowers.

The Chamber of Commerce, however, as it stands up for the nation’s biggest banks and multinational corporations, thinks it best that homeowners simply lose their homes. According to a new CBS/New York Times poll, “53 percent say the federal government should be helping people who are having trouble paying their mortgages.”

Health

White House Confirms Obama Floated Idea Of Raising Medicare Age, ‘The Single Worst Idea For Medicare Reform’

By Travis Waldron and Igor Volsky on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Reports surfaced last week that in his effort to reach a “grand bargain” with Congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, President Obama refused to take cuts to Medicare off the table and said he would consider a proposal to raise the program’s eligibility age from 65 to 67, a plan floated by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Tom Coburn (R-OK). At the White House press briefing this afternoon, Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed that raising Medicare’s eligibility age was under consideration:

REPORTER: In the spirit of rebutting this idea that it has all been smoke and mirrors, is the President willing to raise the retirement age for Medicare and Social Security? [...]

CARNEY: A lot of the reporting about what has been under consideration has been accurate. And I would simply say for those of you, all of you, who are familiar with these issues what hard choices are to judge for yourselves whether the kinds of things that we have been able to consider do not constitute significant, significant, demonstrations of a willingness to compromise and I think the answer is they absolutely do.

Watch it:

For Americans to judge the level of compromise constituted by raising the Medicare eligibility age, they need to know exactly what that proposal would mean for the program. Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, called the scheme “the single worst idea for Medicare reform — which is saying a lot in light of the disastrous Paul Ryan plan for turning Medicare into an inadequate voucher for private insurance.” “It saves Medicare money only by shifting the cost burden onto older Americans caught between the old eligibility age and the new, as well as onto the employers and states that help fund their benefits (and, after 2014, back onto the federal government through subsidized coverage for the uninsured under the 2010 health care reforms).”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, raising the eligibility age to 67 would cause an estimated net increase of $5.6 billion in out-of-pocket health insurance costs for beneficiaries who would have been otherwise covered by Medicare. Seniors in Medicare Part B would also face a 3 percent premium increase, the study found, since younger and healthier enrollees would be routed out of Medicare and into private insurance. Beneficiaries in health care reform’s exchanges would see a similar spike in premiums with the addition of the older population. Employer retiree health costs would also increase by $4.5 billion. “Costs are shifted to older people who have been paying into the Medicare program their entire lives,” the Urban Institute’s Judy Feder said.

Worse still, some seniors between the ages of 65 and 67 could “end up uninsured,” the Center on Budget And Policy Priorities’ Edwin Park predicted. Individuals “with incomes too high for premium subsidies in the exchange and those who qualify for only modest subsidies” could be priced out of affordable coverage, he warned.

Federal cost savings, meanwhile, would be slim. The Congressional Budget Office studied the proposal when it was part of the House GOP’s budget plan and found it “would have little effect on the trajectory of Medicare’s long-term spending…because younger beneficiaries are healthier and thus less costly than the program’s average beneficiary.”

“Private coverage costs more than Medicare for the same benefits and is much less reliable,” Hacker said. “So this is an accounting maneuver that does nothing to address the real challenges of runaway health care costs and insecure coverage.”

Security

‘The Arabs’ Were Not Responsible For 9/11

By Matt Duss on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Fouad Ajami

Iraq war dead-ender Fouad Ajami pounces on Defense Secretary Panetta’s comments about al Qaeda and Iraq in order to repeat his “one Arab is as good as another” justification for the Iraq invasion:

Those were Arabs, not Afghans, who struck America on that day, and it had been the proper thing to strike at an Arab “return address,” because the American strike against the Taliban did not suffice. Panetta, in an unguarded moment, gave voice to a fundamental truth about the U.S. expedition into Iraq. [...]

Our country made its way to Iraq some 18 months after 9/11 because the menace against America in that time of peril had come from Arab lands. It was Arab financiers who made it possible for the plotters and the death pilots to do their grim work. It was Arab religious preachers, with the prestige of the Arabic language, the language of the Islamic revelation, who were sowing the winds of anti-Americanism and “weaponizing” the faith itself. And it was sly Arab governments winking at the forces of terror and enabling it while posing as America’s clients and allies. We had to get the attention of the Arabs, strike against Arab targets, take on the pathologies of that world.

So, because the people who attacked us on 9/11 were Arabs, the U.S. needed to kill some Arabs in response. No matter how many times Ajami writes this, it never gets less racist. (It’s worth noting the similarity here to Osama bin Laden’s support for killing Americans, any old Americans, for the alleged sins of the American government. In both cases, what’s important is to send a message.)

Ajami goes on to once again scold critics of the war for failing to recognize its benefits, such as they are. I’ve noted repeatedly the importance of Iraq being the first Arab state where Islamists have been given an opportunity to govern and the possible lessons that might be drawn from this in regard to Islamists’ political participation in other countries in the region.

On the other hand, like so many of the war’s most vigorous cheerleaders, Ajami himself has never shown any real interest in grappling with the war’s costs, which far, far outweigh its benefits. Should he ever decide to do so, he can start with our May 2010 report.

This post was cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

NEWS FLASH

Fox News Covers Bachmann’s Ex-Gay Clinics, Accuses Group Of Conducting ‘Hit Piece’ Against Political Spouse | Fox News’ new Glenn Beck replacement, ‘The Five‘ covered Truth Wins Out’s recent undercover investigation showing that Dr. Marcus Bachmann’s Christian counseling clinics encouraged some gay patients to change their sexual orientation with prayer and therapy. But rather than condemning these dangerous and discredited techniques, the hosts accused the group of unfairly attacking Michele Bachmann’s spouse. Co-host Greg Gutfeld joked that the story sparked his curiosity because he hasn’t been able to “ungay” his gay friends and they have failed to “unstraight” him. Watch it:

Yglesias

The Consumer Surplus Of The Internet

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Tyler Cowen has a couple of posts up questioning the idea that the Internet results in some giant unmeasured consumer surplus.

The main thing I have to add to this is from what I know of blog traffic statistics. In short Traffic is highest during the 12 hours between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern Time that reflect when people are at work. Traffic tends to peak during the time when people are at the office in all four American time zones. Traffic is much higher on weekdays than on weekends. Traffic is much lower on holiday Mondays than on regular Mondays. Traffic is much lower during the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Thanksgiving than on normal Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Traffic is unusually low during the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

This is a long-winded way of saying that people read things on the Internet primarily when they’re supposed to be working. One interpretation of that is that the consumer surplus is pretty small. People don’t want to spend their leisure time reading my blog. But there are other interpretation. Maybe “ability to surf the web at work” is enormously valuable to people, but people also spend enough time at work that this leaves them basically sated.

Alyssa

Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Revolutionary War Edition

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:19 pm

A week ago today, I complained that we don’t have enough movies about the Founding Fathers. Today, I get news that Johnny Depp is producing, and may star in, a movie about Paul Revere and the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

I suspect that no matter how this comes to pass, it will be more Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s version, less David Hackett Fischer’s (if you haven’t read Paul Revere’s Ride, I recommend it highly). The thing that’s always impressed me about Revere’s ride is not that he made it all the way, because he didn’t, but that once he was out of British custody, he came back to Lexington and snuck a bunch of John Hancock’s papers out of Buckman Tavern — while the battle was still going on behind him. It’s an act of rather stupendous badassery enabled by the general confusion about everything that was going on at the time.

But then, the whole Battle of Lexington and Concord, despite the fact that the Colonials got badly beaten at Lexington, is really kind of astonishing. That the Colonial forces activated this theoretical plan based on disused defense practices from times when clashes with Native Americans were more frequent, and that it worked, is tremendous and exciting and moving — and it should be. There are a lot of ways to tell the heroic stories of that day, including my favorite, an elderly man who basically set up a sniper station to shoot at the British as they marched past his house, was bayonetted repeatedly, survived, and went on to remarry and live another decade. Paul Revere is an easily dramatized way into the story, but a movie about it that takes a broader scope is potentially much more interesting, particularly if it deprives Depp chances to mug wildly while on horseback, and maybe do something Jack Sparrow-like, including getting knocked off said horse by a low-hanging tree limb. And given that all the relevant buildings in Lexington are still standing, it would be cool if they shot locally.

Justice

Groups To Protest SB 1070 Before Major League Baseball All-Star Game Tonight

By Travis Waldron on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:15 pm

Photo by Associated Press

As Major League Baseball’s top players gather in Phoenix for the sport’s annual All-Star Game tonight, they will be joined by protesters who aren’t nearly as happy to be there. Immigrants rights groups are expecting hundreds to convene outside Chase Field before the game to protest Senate Bill 1070, the extreme anti-immigrant law passed by Arizona’s legislature in 2010.

An assortment of progressive activists and organizations — including America’s Voice, National Council of La Raza, and the AFL-CIO — called on MLB commissioner Bud Selig to move the game when the law passed last year. MLB declined to change the venue, but Salvador Reza, of the Puente Movement, said the groups will use the national stage to let fans and players know that the law has had a devastating effect on the state:

“Even though the All-Star Game still continued — it wasn’t stopped supposedly because part of SB1070 was blocked — parts are still in effect and still causing a lot of havoc in the streets,” Reza said.

“Arizona is still a hateful state, Arizona is still separating families. There are other ways of solving the situation.”

Another group, Somos America, will pass out white ribbons to fans entering the stadium as another form of protest.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the law’s biggest proponents, had planned his own chain gang demonstration in support of the law, but called it off earlier this week.

Though MLB players are reticent to participate in any form of protest — even those who previously said they might — the efforts opposing SB 1070 are gaining momentum again. Election officials recently certified recall petitions against state Senate President Russell Pearce (R), who drove the effort to pass the law, and a federal appeals court struck down some of the law’s most damaging provisions in April.

Related Posts

Older

Newer

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up