Federal Court Backs States against EPA

One of the ways in which the Bush administration is clearly not conservative is in its preference for national non-regulation of business as opposed to local and state regulation thereof. In a federal appellate court earlier this week, that view got a kick in the teeth when the Environmental Protection Agency’s prohibition on state and local governments’ supplemental environmental monitoring efforts got overturned. The American federal system appears to be more than a fairy tale.

To help readers understand the mess, the Washington Post reported, “In 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act in an effort to simplify the pollution permitting process for factories, power plants and other industries. The amendments gave state and local jurisdictions the task of issuing the pollution permits with EPA oversight. State and local governments have issued more than 16,000 pollution permits since then. But the local governments have faced questions of how to update monitoring requirements in the absence of clear guidance from federal regulators.”

So far so good. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it usually requires some bureaucratic adjustments but no more than that. Leave it to the Busheviks to make it into a federal case, quite literally. In 2002, the EPA proposed that, absent federal guidance, state and local governments could increase monitoring, industry groups bitched, and the proposal died quietly. Instead, the EPA adopted the prohibition on increased monitoring. In 2004, an appeals court threw it out because the EPA had not allowed a comment period (apparently, no agency in the Bush administration has to follow the law unless it matches the president’s ideology). In 2006 and following a comment period, the prohibition came into force, and the court case ensued.

Judge Thomas B. Griffith, writing for the majority, stated, “The question in this case is whether permitting authorities may supplement inadequate monitoring requirements when EPA has taken no action.” That’s all this is about, monitoring. That is to say, it is about collecting data. Nothing in this case talked about greater regulation. Keri Powell, a lawyer with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said, “If the monitoring isn't good enough, the whole system falls apart.”

The Bush administration’s hostility to scientific inquiry is well known to the point of being embarrassing. The White House lies at the heart of the Counter-Enlightenment, and this prohibition is just one more assault on reason. The EPA may, of course, appeal, but at least for now, independent courts have kept the forces of ignorance on their heels.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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