Dear 111th Congress,

I know that you are very busy these days pondering new ways to screw up health care and figuring out exactly how much money you need to spend in order to reduce the deficit, but you might want to take a moment to examine what’s going on at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

You remember USEPA, right? Your predecessors created it and gave it the authority to ensure that America has clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. The Agency has been pretty darn successful at fulfilling that mission and it employs armies of scientists, attorneys, technicians and other professionals to accomplish the tasks assigned to it. Paying all of those troops is expensive, as in several billion dollars worth of expensive, but seeing as how new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has inflated the Agency’s budget by almost 50%, there would seem to be little reason for USEPA to outsource its authority. Yet, that’s exactly what has been going on, and I thought that someone should bring the situation to your attention.

pollution

Now as we all know, George W. Bush was the worst environmental President in history. Unfortunately, this assertion is complicated by the embarrassing fact that the amount of pollutants in the nation’s air was reduced to the lowest levels that we have ever seen since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970. It therefore behooves USEPA and the current administration to redefine the term “clean air” by redefining the standards that determine what is clean and what is dirty. Administrator Jackson has tackled this problem, publishing a new standard for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and proposing new standards for ozone and sulfur dioxide (SO2). (more…)