Why do people hate epa

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Subscribe ». Looking for news you can trust? Freeman and A. Following is the first of two Dan Farber blog entries reposted today from LegalPlanet. But consider the alternatives when it comes to dealing with environmental problems. Basically, bureaucrats are part of the executive branch of government. For instance, the head of EPA is appointed by the President and can be removed by the President at any time.

So that leaves the three branches of government: the courts, the executive branch, and Congress. In the case of environmental problems, the reluctance is well-founded. Major pollution problems involve very technical scientific and engineering issues, complex economics, and hard tradeoffs.

Before , most cities and towns simply dumped their sewage directly into waterways, with little or no treatment. Intrepid bathers in Long Island Sound were routinely surrounded by bits of used toilet paper. Stinky algal blooms were common, as were fish kills. The Clean Water Act led to tens of billions of federal dollars being invested in municipal sewage treatment plants.

But people do swim in Boston Harbor and the Hudson River. And the toxic cesspools that literally catch on fire have largely become a thing of the past. In her seminal book Silent Spring , Rachel Carson popularized emerging research that showed DDT was wreaking havoc on birds by making their eggs thin to the point of disintegration.

Beloved birds like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon teetered toward extinction. A colorless, nearly odorless insecticide, DDT had been a valuable weapon against disease-carrying mosquitoes and also a boon to farmers. People had so little notion of its dangers they let their children play happily in the spray. That same year Congress passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act , giving EPA more clear authority to regulate pesticides in general based on their impact on health and the environment.

Until the s, hazardous chemical waste was general disposed of like ordinary trash—at best in an unlined municipal landfill from which toxic chemicals could seep into groundwater, at worst in open dumps, where runoff from corroded barrels might contaminate streams. The country was dotted with thousands of such dumps.

EPA now tracks chemical waste from hundreds of thousands of facilities; it requires landfills to be lined and water leaching through them to be collected before it can contaminate drinking water. RCRA also regulates municipal waste and has given a big push to recycling. If RCRA is about handling waste right in the present, the Superfund law is about cleaning up the dumps of the past. In , hundreds of residents of Love Canal, New York, near Niagara Falls, were sickened; their planned community had been built on an old toxic waste dump operated previously by the Hooker Chemical Company.

The neighborhood was eventually demolished and cleaned, and the incident helped jump-start the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of , commonly known as Superfund. Under that law EPA is slowly trying to clean up a nationwide legacy of Love Canals, recovering costs where it can from the original polluters. As National Geographic reported in , nearly half of the more than 1, Superfund sites have been fully addressed—but even many of them have to be monitored indefinitely.

Some 49 million or nearly one in six Americans live close to a Superfund site. Like government agencies in nearly every other country in the world, EPA is now trying to extend that principle to carbon dioxide, the waste gas produced by burning fossil fuels, which is warming the planet.

In August the agency finalized its Clean Power Plan, which for the first time sets a national limit on carbon pollution from power plants. The goal is to reduce their emissions by 32 percent by , relative to levels. The plan is a central part of the U. Court of Appeals in Washington by Scott Pruitt, the attorneys general of 23 other states, and a raft of utilities and fossil fuel companies. After retiring from that mission decades ago, William Ruckelshaus went on to serve as an executive at Weyerhaeuser, the lumber company, and Browning Ferris, a waste management company.

He has also served on the board of Monsanto. At EPA, you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally pursue. You're not there for the money, you're there for something beyond yourself. All rights reserved. Editor's note: An earlier version of this story understated the extent to which the benefits of EPA air pollution rules exceed the costs.