GOP presidential candidates battle clean air, water by attacking EPA

Monday, Aug. 22, 2011 | 2 a.m.

Industrial growth and the popularity of automobiles transformed America from an agrarian society to a rapidly modernized country that became the envy of the world. But modernization came with a heavy price, as muscular factories and gas-fueled vehicles belched enough pollutants into the atmosphere. Allergy sufferers and those with asthma took notice. Los Angeles became as famous for its smog as for its Dodgers, Lakers and movie stars. Fish would mysteriously turn up dead in streams.

The Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 under Republican President Richard Nixon, is charged with protecting the nation’s air, land and bodies of water from toxic substances that threaten humans, plants and animals. It is a difficult task but one that is crucial because it improves the quality of life.

The Republicans who want to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the 2012 election don’t see it that way. As reported last week by The New York Times, they view the EPA as a symbol of Obama’s heavy-handed regulatory agenda that they say is strangling the economy. Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota wants to eliminate the agency, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry wants a moratorium on environmental regulation. Other Republicans would gut the agency, with businessman Herman Cain recommending that oil and gas executives have a hand in regulating the environment. But such talk is nonsense.

Would these candidates like to return us to the days when air pollution in a big city was so thick during daylight it would virtually shroud out the sun? Would streams, rivers and lakes be turned into dead zones? Might hazardous chemical dumping on land near schools and churches continue unabated?

This nation would see the rapid return of infamous Superfund sites such as Colorado’s Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapons facility that polluted a large site near Denver with radioactive plutonium. In Southern Nevada, imagine the danger to Lake Mead and our drinking water supply if authorities didn’t aggressively demand the cleanup of chemical waste runoff from the Black Mountain Industrial Complex in Henderson.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone who enjoys the great outdoors, including conservative Republicans who hunt and fish, would want to see the EPA disappear. As David Jenkins of Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that advocates conservation, told the Times in reference to the anti-EPA rhetoric: “Not only are these positions irresponsible, they’re politically problematic. The whole idea that you have to bash the EPA and run away from climate change to win a Republican primary has never been borne out.”

Republican presidential candidates should quit blaming the EPA, which protects the air we breathe and the water we drink, for what ails the economy. Trying to use the Environmental Protection Agency as a whipping post isn’t going to do anything to create jobs, reduce the deficit or put this nation on stronger footing.