By now you've undoubtedly learned of the Colorado mine spill where EPA officials trying to clean up a toxic waste site in an abandoned gold mine accidentally breached a dam inside the mine, sending three millions of gallons of disgusting yellow wastewater and sludge into the Animas river, running through Southwestern Colorado into the San Juan River in New Mexico and, yesterday, reaching Utah. The dam in the "Gold King" mine had been leaking up to 250 gallons of toxic wastewater a minute at the time EPA officials were dispatched in an effort to plug the leak. They failed, instead hacking through a critical portion of the dam, causing the catastrophic spill. This Diary by Thinking Fella is the most comprehensive written on the site about the tragedy, which, unfortunately is ongoing.
The mine was owned by a "group" called the "San Juan Corporation" and was originally targeted by the EPA as a Superfund site, objected to and delayed ad infinitum by the local citizenry and many interest groups, including mining cooperatives who saw the potential for further gold mining at the site, and townspeople and civic groups who objected to the idea of their home being designated with the Scarlet "S." Colorado has about 23,0000 abandoned mines, 200 in the Animas watershed alone. The U.S. in total has about 500,000 such mines.
There's no doubt that the EPA officials screwed up, and they've acknowledged as much. And there's a lot of anger from residents who now have a thoroughly polluted waterway to contend with for an indefinite time. It's an ugly scene. In other words, it's the perfect opportunity for the Republican Party to go into its reflexive high gear criticizing a Federal Agency who they love to hate. And they are screaming loudly about it already.
Here's Republican Congressman, Scott Tipton, whose district is next to the river:
“If a mining operator or other private business caused the spill to occur, the EPA would be all over them,” Tipton said. “The EPA admits fault, and as such must be accountable and held to the same standard. In the coming days my staff and I will be working to get a full picture of what happened, as well as an answer to a question on many people’s minds: what resources and funds will the EPA dedicate to clean up the site and provide restitution for damages?”
Except Tipton has a
heinous voting record with respect to the environment, including several votes to defund "resources and funds" from the same EPA from which he is is now claiming entitlement to assistance and restitution.
Here is an account of his anti-environment actions, along with those of former Colorado Congressman, now Colorado's Republican Senator, Cory Gardner, both of whom are lapping up
media coverage for themselves by heaping blame on the EPA for the disaster:
Colorado Conservation Voters issued a report Monday highlighting the poor environmental record of Tipton and his fellow Republican congressmen Cory Gardner and Doug Lamborn, who collectively have made 370 votes against the environment this year while largely supporting a pro-polluter agenda. “Congressmen Gardner, Lamborn and Tipton have sided with Big Oil and dirty energy interests at every opportunity during the 112th Congress, voting to protect their unnecessary subsidies while working to block the EPA’s ability to hold these corporate polluters accountable,” said Colorado Conservation Voters Executive Director Pete Maysmith. …The trio of environmental troublemakers voted 18 times this year to protect tax breaks for big oil, 57 times against efforts to combat climate change, 134 times against programs and funding to keep water and air clean, 98 times to defund or weaken the EPA and 64 times against renewable energy initiatives.
Cory Gardner's record of opposing the EPA is
particularly dismal. Gardner co-sponsored the GOP's legislation opposing the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases. His lifetime environmental record with the League of Conservation Voters is a
whopping 3%, And speaking of toxic mining waste, here's a piece of legislation Gardner
voted for:
House Roll Call Vote 141
Issue: Water
Representative Bill Johnson (R-OH) sponsored H.R. 2824, the Preventing Government Waste and Protecting Coal Mining Jobs in America Act, which would nullify safeguards that prevent the dumping of dangerous mining waste into our waterways. The bill would eliminate a commonsense Reagan-era rule requiring a 100-foot buffer zone around waterways to protect them from toxic coal mining waste, and it would reinstate a 2008 rule that was recently struck down in federal court. The 2008 rule would exempt the most destructive mining practices from the buffer requirement, leaving streams and waterways vulnerable to sludge and other mining debris.
You might think that Congressman Tipton and Senator Gardner might want to take a back seat at this point. But you'd be wrong:
In a letter Friday addressed to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Senators Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner, as well as Congressman Scott Tipton, said, "The community has expressed serious concerns about the speed and scope of the EPA's initial response."
Really, the response was too
slow for Tipton and Gardner?
Here is what the Republican Party did to the EPA's budget just this past June:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was dealt a massive blow this week by the House Appropriations committee, where the Republican majority voted to further cut the agency’s budget and reduce its authority to enforce laws safeguarding our air, water and health.
The House committee voted on Tuesday to slash the EPA’s budget by 9%, or $718 million. This is in addition to a dramatic 20% reduction in overall funding that has taken place since the control of the House of Representatives switched to the Republican Party in 2011. This new reduction will put EPA funding at its lowest level since 1989.
Another Republican environmental no-show crawling out to crow about the spill is Texas Republican Lamar Smith:
“It has been five days since the spill and the EPA has failed to answer important questions, including whether the polluted water poses health risks to humans or animals..."”
Smith is another rabid opponent of the EPA, and heads something called the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which according to a recent report has devoted more time to
searching for aliens than addressing climate change. When he's not speaking to climate denialist conventions, he's attacking the EPA:
As chairman of the House Science Committee, Smith has lead a charge against the EPA. He’s introduced legislation to shift federal funding away from renewable energy and climate studies, and prevent the Department of Energy from advising the EPA based on it’s own research.
The Republican Party's mouthpieces are also out in full force, gleefully pressing the attack. The
National Review weighs in with this quote from a guy named Daniel Simmons:
“First, isn’t the point of EPA to protect the environment?” says Daniel Simmons, director of regulatory affairs for the Institute for Energy Research. He adds that it’s significant that a government agency, as opposed to a private company, was responsible for the spill.
Simmons is described as the "director of regulatory affairs" for the "Institute for Energy Research." What's that? Well let's see...According to their website, they're:
[A] not-for-profit organization that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets. IER maintains that freely-functioning energy markets provide the most efficient and effective solutions to today’s global energy and environmental challenges and, as such, are critical to the well-being of individuals and society.
That free-market talk gets you all tingly, doesn't it? But
Wikipedia tells us a little more:
The Institute for Energy Research has a political arm, the American Energy Alliance, which is responsible for multi-million dollar television advertising campaigns that have attacked energy policy, ideas and positions of the Obama Administration that are contrary to the those held by IER. The American Energy Alliance is run by Thomas (Tom) Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries.
The Koch brothers' network of industries, of course, are among the
biggest polluters on the planet. The Koch-funded think tank that calls itself the American Energy Alliance has
compared EPA regulations to CIA torture techniques. And Simmons? Well, he's a little more than what the
National Review describes:
Daniel Simmons is IER’s Vice President for Policy....Prior to joining IER, Simmons served as director of the Natural Resources Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, and worked as professional staff on the Committee on Resources of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The director of ALEC's "Natural Resource Task Force?" Try to imagine such a thing. Hint--it has
little if anything to do with actually protecting the environment.
The shadowy Koch-lobbyist run "Institute For Energy Research" shows up again in an article in the Washington Times, calling out President Obama because he isn't slamming the EPA as hard as he did BP for its Gulf disaster. This time the mouthpiece is someone named Dan Kish:
They’re doing precisely the sorts of things they level charges at other people for doing,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the conservative Institute for Energy Research.
“It’s ironic in a lot of ways because, typically, when big, iconic things happen like this, they spend a huge amount of time trying to throw gasoline on the fire,” Mr. Kish said. “They always tell us they’re right, everybody is wrong. In this particular case, they’ve got their hands full.”
Kish, a CNN regular for the energy industry, attacked political donor and environmentalist Tom Steyer for having a
"global warming fetish."
As of February 2014 there were 1322 Superfund sites on the priorities list in the United States. The EPA has cleaned up 375 of them, no thanks to Scott Tipton, Cory Gardner, Lamar Smith or any Koch Brothers "front group." The EPA enforces the country's environmental laws governing lands, waterways, and the air we breathe. Broadly speaking, the EPA is:
[R]esponsible for preventing and detecting environmental crimes, informing the public of environmental enforcement, and setting and monitoring standards of air pollution, water pollution, hazardous wastes and chemicals.
* * *
The agency also works with industries and all levels of government in a wide variety of voluntary pollution prevention programs and energy conservation efforts.
The EPA has a 45 year
record of accomplishments:
From regulating auto emissions to banning the use of DDT; from cleaning up toxic waste to protecting the ozone layer; from increasing recycling to revitalizing inner-city brownfields, EPA's achievements have resulted in cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land.
The protection of drinking water is also under the purview of the EPA:
EPA ensures safe drinking water for the public, by setting standards for more than 160,000 public water systems throughout the United States. EPA oversees states, local governments and water suppliers to enforce the standards, under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
If the Republican Party had its way we'd be looking at hundreds of these spills every year, with no resources to clean them up. The fact that they've chosen this single instance to pile on with their criticism of the EPA, the only organization tasked with cleaning up the toxic messes caused by their corporate backers, is just another indication of their raw hypocrisy.
