The way we are seeing the blatant GOP intent to Gut, defund, and do away with vitally important agencies is pure insanity. The fight to preserve these entities is way bigger than the battle for the broad stroke gutting or rendering them useless or non existent.
This goes back to what I’ve been saying, that we are having the war on these, but the fight is about reminding the GOP and the public what these agencies do. Not only that but why they were put in place, and the money that they actually save the government by holding industries responsible for damage they are doing or will do if they aren’t held accountable.
The EPA isn’t about trying to do damage to corporations that the government “hates” and is trying to destroy, as they so moronically try to represent. No industry should or needs to be allowed to make vast profits at the expense of the environment or any other property owner.
One example of the pure stupidity we are dealing with is levels of dysfunctional inspection and enforcement for drilling and production of oil and gas. If there are not enough inspectors to actually inspect anything but a small fraction of drilling or production of wells, it’s a job creator to hire however many people it would take to give inspections the full amount of coverage it needs. Funding is cut for the entities that are supposed to do this so that they can’t afford the inspectors needed. Well, 10,000 more inspectors can be paid for on a per job basis, and it doesn’t have to cost taxpayers a dime. You want to build a house, your county is going to charge for permits because they have to pay for the inspections that are going to need to be done. It costs over $40k in this county to get a permit to build a house. Drilling permits should be costing tens of thousands of dollars. Every site should be inspected at several stages. Violations of safety valves and well casings done so as to save half a million on a safety valve should cost multiples more in fines, the penalty has to far exceed the amount that can be saved by cutting corners. Inspectors need to be kept honest by enforcing jail sentences for taking bribes to look the other way, inspection teams need to be rotated so as to be looking at what has been done to date.
Here’s where the CBO and GAO come in. Nothing should be able to happen that guts or hampers the effectiveness of regulatory entities. These investigative entities have the ability to assess with full documentation different cost analysis of cost of damage, money saved making industries pay for their damages and cleanup, cost if left for the government to pay for, amount saved when the industry pays for it. This analysis needs to be part of everything congress wants to do, not just what the GOP wants to decide what’s revealed or kept hidden. The EPA and other regulatory entities and laws have been long hard fights, and undoing them would be a fight that the GOP would lose if it takes place with full transparency. That has got to become the standard.
The very idea that the GOP could pass a bill or have the president make an executive order that takes away the restriction that keeps coal companies from dumping toxic waste in streams is beyond ludicrous, it’s criminal. If this were a bill that had to be introduced for debate, it would die a quick death at the point where the GOP were asked to justify why companies should or need to be allowed to dump their waste in public water.
We’ve been here before, industries destroyed creeks, streams, and rivers that took aggressive regulations and decades to bring back with cleanup efforts by people who care. Companies doing fracking are not complying with the sensible regulations that are on the books, regulations that go a long way to insure there are less breaches that poison water aquifers used by farmers and cities. Oil pipelines are rupturing by the hundreds every year, at this point the EPA has all to often hamstrung as far as doing anything about the worst of the problems.
The fight is about the way the GOP is forced to enact repeals, deregulation, and defunding. The idea of doing any of this does not fly when it comes under scrutiny. The time to fight isn’t after stupid things are done that cause damage, it’s about keeping them from being undermined in the first place.
Regulations are about preventing crimes and enforcing them when they have happened. The act of deregulating that is a crime itself, and those who are trying to pass these efforts need to be hounded and exposed for the crimes they are trying to perpetrate on behalf of industries that do not need it.
Why should taxpayers be on the hook for cleaning up messes that are better prevented by laws that keep them from happening in the first place?