The Environmental Protection Agency has been working for more than two decades to reduce particulate pollution in the air. But contrary to the claims of some farm-state lawmakers, it is not planning to crack down on farm dust. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson wrote a letter to Congress last week emphasizing that she wants to keep the current standard for particulate matter. EPA said in a statement that it “hopes that this action finally puts an end to the myth that the agency is planning to tighten this regulation.”
It’s good that our congressional delegation and other GOP lawmakers are monitoring the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure its policies make sense. But they shouldn’t exaggerate and demonize for political purposes. That’s been happening a lot lately, as an “out of control EPA” fits a GOP narrative about too much regulation. Thus, there have been phony or embellished claims about the EPA regulating farm dust and wanting to tax ranchers for cow flatulence. Even Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute called out the GOP for its diversionary scare tactics. “Instead of trying to contribute to a solution to our economic problems,” he said, “Congress is trying to whip people into a frenzy and get them to believe the worst.”
Whether he deserves it or not, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, is seen by a growing number of observers as “the congressman from Koch.” Pompeo discounts this perception. He argues his legislative efforts to kill new regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency are in defense of “entrepreneurism” and originate from his own views as a former businessman, not from any influence by Koch Industries or Charles and David Koch. Koch interests were the largest contributors to Pompeo’s successful campaign for the 4th District seat in Congress in 2010. Koch Industries refurbishes and operates refineries and pipelines. It has a history of troubles with the EPA and has settled several long, drawn-out lawsuits with the agency. Perhaps it is true that Pompeo just happens to agree with the Kochs and is not simply carrying water for them. The real question, however, is whether the congressman sees how his initiatives to oppose EPA regulations at every turn make it look as if he cares more about the agenda of the Kochs than he does for the aspirations and needs of the rest of his constituents in the 4th District. — Winfield Daily Courier
The charge that I am carrying water for Kansas oil companies and am not concerned about the health of Kansans is baseless. I am committed to standing up for commonsense regulations and stopping those that impose enormous costs for little or no benefit. We all want safe drinking water and clean air, but the staggering costs and, at best, questionable benefits that would result from this president’s EPA regulations are disconnected from basic common sense. For example, Kansans produce and consume a whole lot of electricity. One specific EPA rule being put forth regarding utilities will drive up the cost for families to heat their homes and the cost for businesses to run their equipment. A second example is the EPA’s efforts to implement its cross-state air-pollution rule. By overstating and misrepresenting the science behind the “health benefits” of this rule, the EPA will do tremendous economic harm for nearly no improvement in total air quality in our region. The EPA has become a rogue agency, acting outside of its legal authority and failing to recognize that its actions are destroying our way of life and our economy. As the congressman from a place that is a global leader in agriculture and aviation manufacturing, and that relies heavily on the production and use of safe, clean and affordable energy, I will continue to fight the EPA’s excesses. — Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, who is making his name as a crusader against the Environmental Protection Agency, now aims to defund EPA minority student internships and fellowships with a proposed “EPA Student Nondiscrimination Act.” The EPA says the program provides “student internship opportunities focusing on environmental justice.” But Pompeo said: “At a time when millions of Americans cannot find work and are saddled with record deficits and crippling environmental regulations, spending $6,000 of taxpayer money per student to act as tools of this administration’s radical policies is clearly not acceptable — nor is it ever the role of the federal government to indoctrinate.” Pompeo’s legislation also would prevent funding for “programs related to the study of greenhouse-gas emissions.”
By 2020, the amount of Canadian oil shipped to the United States could double from current levels, increasing up to 5 million barrels per day and accounting for at least 40 percent of America’s oil imports. But that depends on the construction of the Keystone pipeline, a 1,700-mile artery extending from Alberta to Texas refineries at the Gulf of Mexico. Keystone will be the most modern pipeline in the world, equipped with monitoring devices to check the facility’s integrity. Most important, if construction of the Keystone pipeline is blocked, the Canadians won’t leave oil sands in the ground. China covets the oil and, if need be, a pipeline could be built to carry the oil to Pacific ports in Canada, where it would be loaded on tankers and shipped to Asian markets. Another thing: the Keystone pipeline would create 20,000 American jobs and nearly 120,000 indirect jobs as well as increase revenues for state and local governments along its route. It would be senseless to forfeit such a huge economic stimulus with guaranteed job creation and an estimated $20 billion in revenue at a time when 25 million Americans are looking for work. — Mark J. Perry, University of Michigan-Flint
While importing oil from Canada is arguably better than getting it from the Middle East, there are two major problems with this option. One is that we remain dependent on a highly polluting fuel source. The process of extracting and processing tar-sand oil comes with an especially heavy environmental toll. It contributes substantially more to greenhouse-gas emissions than conventionally produced oil. The second problem surrounds the building of new sections of pipeline from the Canadian oil fields in northern Alberta to refineries in Texas. The $7 billion, 1,700 mile-long Keystone XL pipeline could handle an extra 700,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day. But opponents argue that such pipelines have a heightened risk of oil spills due to the corrosive nature of tar-sands oil. The pipeline also would cross the shallow Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world and vital for the region’s $20 billion agricultural operations. — Michael E. Kraft, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Dave Heineman, the Republican governor of Nebraska, urged President Obama last week to deny the federal permit for the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline connecting Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries on the Texas Gulf coast, arguing its path over the Ogallala Aquifer is too risky. But at a time when the U.S. needs jobs, the Obama administration should say “yes” to the pipeline, argued Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson: “TransCanada, the pipeline’s sponsor, says the project should result in 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. Most would be American, because 80 percent of the 1,661-mile pipeline would be in the United States.” Plus, he wrote, the pipeline would strengthen U.S.-Canada ties, and “we already import about half of our oil, and Canada is our largest supplier, with about 25 percent of imports. But its conventional fields are declining. Only oil sands can fill the gap.”
When Republicans dismiss “global warming,” they tend to focus on the second word. In a column on Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen observed that the first word also grates on the GOP: “Global warming is global, and reversing it would take global programs. This means that standards and limits have to be imposed by the much-reviled federal government — and it, in turn, has to cooperate with other nations. This nationalization and internationalization of a problem and solution are not, to say the least, very tea-partyish.”
Sedgwick County commissioners didn’t bless a proposed construction and demolition landfill Wednesday as much as kick the idea down the road, where it now will be thoroughly analyzed by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the county’s solid-waste experts. The 4-1 approval was hard to take for the emotional and outspoken opponents of the dump, proposed for 55th Street South and Ridge. But commissioners clearly have lots of questions about how such a C&D landfill might affect water, airport safety, quality of life and more. The process should arm them with answers and inform their eventual decision of whether to allow the landfill.
“I understand the temptation to view anything that has resulted in Al Gore’s receiving a Nobel Prize as a conspiracy of some sort,” columnist Alexandra Petri wrote about GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s contention that global warming is a hoax. But, she also said, “the facts just don’t line up. The facts contumaciously persist in asserting that, whether we like it or not, climate change is happening. Science says so. Scientists say so. Data say so. . . . Birds say so. Bees say so. Even educated fleas say so, unless they are running in a Republican flea primary.”
The Washington Post also did a fact check on Perry’s claims about global warming and awarded him “four Pinocchios,” its highest rating for “whoppers.”
Thanks to fracking, the gas rush is on with tens of thousands of new wells popping up.
And why not? Natural gas burns cleaner than oil or coal, it’s cheaper than foreign oil and it creates jobs. That’s what the industry is pitching, and it’s probably safer than nuclear energy.
Or is it?
When a well broke in Bradford County, Pa., tens of thousands of gallons of fracking fluids leaked into the Susquehanna River, just like the 8,000 gallons that seeped into a creek near Dimock, Pa.
It’s not just chemicals.
The New York Times obtained Environmental Protection Agency documents revealing that wastewater from fracking is often much more radioactive than federal regulators deem safe for treatment plants to handle. We need a moratorium on the helter-skelter drilling of new fracking wells, until the process is proved safe or made safe.
— Arnold Mann, McClatchy News Service
Over the last few years, U.S. and world natural gas reserves have soared as we’ve discovered how to apply the technique known as “fracking” to unleash gas trapped in deep underground shale formations.
Fracking involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals under pressure into underground formations, releasing the gas trapped there.
This has revolutionized America’s energy picture. Shale gas made up just 1 percent of gas supply in 2000; today it’s 25 percent.
Thus far fracking’s dangers are mostly theoretical. Earlier this year EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Congress that there had been “no proven cases where the fracking process itself has affected water.”
The natural gas industry doesn’t have its hand out asking for subsidies. Making sure we do not shut down development of our natural gas reserves with ill-considered regulatory measures is critical to our energy future.
— Andrew Morriss, University of Alabama
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., made Salon.com’s list of “the arid Southwest’s 10 great climate deniers.” The author noted that since Moran worked in the House to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, “‘drought emergencies’ have been declared throughout half of Kansas, and some portions of the state are suffering through half-normal rainfall averages. As in Oklahoma, ranchers across the state have been forced to sell off cattle for an inability to feed them.”
In the wake of the Fourth of July problems in Wichita — where fireworks pushed ozone levels over federal limits and fireworks complaints tied up 911 dispatch — city officials need to consider again whether it’s time for a fireworks ban. Some will question whether a ban would do any good, considering how many people already ignore rules such as the prohibition of fireworks that top 6 feet. But Garden City might provide a guide. Because of drought conditions, Finney County banned the sale and discharge of fireworks this year, even canceling the usual public show. According to the Garden City Telegram, city officers wrote four citations over the weekend, with one officer describing the Fourth as “incredibly crazy slow.” Sheriff’s deputies received only three reports and wrote no citations.
On this World Oceans Day, former first lady Laura Bush is calling for intensified “efforts to better understand, manage and conserve our waters and marine habitats.” She noted that while there has been great progress in protecting the environment in the past several decades, little of that progress has addressed the 70 percent of the world’s surface covered by oceans. “Less than one-half of 1 percent of the world’s oceans are protected in ways that will ensure they stay wild,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Too often overharvesting depletes what should be a lasting bounty of fish. In some parts of the oceans today up to 90 percent of large fish are gone from natural ecosystems.” She also noted that trash and pollution end up in oceans, killing fish, turtles and birds. “Currents in the Pacific have created a plastic garbage dump twice the size of Texas,” she wrote.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, marked Earth Day by blasting the Environmental Protection Agency and its “rogue behavior” in a commentary on the Hill’s Congress blog. “All agree we want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink,” he wrote. But President Obama and his EPA “have lost sight of our shared common goals and are instead advancing a radical, left-wing, ideological agenda, tantamount to faith because it is without reason, which narrowly focuses on eliminating fossil fuels.” Pompeo called for “ceasing to treat industry like an adversary that needs to be defeated. We can protect the environment if we work together as a nation and propose commonsense workable solutions, not EPA power grabs based on anti-fossil fuel ideology.”
How is the Earth doing on this Earth Day? And how about environmentalism? Do GOP gains in Congress reflect changing public opinion about global warming and environmental regulations?
Delays and doubts continue to dog the proposed new coal-fired power plant near Holcomb. Last week a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service acted improperly by not conducting an environmental impact study and not holding public hearings. A new report released last week also determined that coal plants haven’t delivered on their promised economic impact. The Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies in Chattanooga, Tenn., studied the six largest plants that came on line between 2005 and 2009 and found that only 56 percent of the projected jobs actually were created.
Rod Bremby, the former secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, has been appointed to lead Connecticut’s Department of Social Services. “I am truly thrilled to have Rod join the team,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said in a statement Tuesday. Bremby served as KDHE secretary from 2003 until 2010, the longest tenure of any secretary in the department’s history. Former Gov. Mark Parkinson pushed Bremby out of the job last November in what many viewed as an attempt to ensure approval of the new coal-fired power plant near Holcomb.
Defunding implementation of the health care law has been a stated goal of House Republicans. But Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, led a charge Wednesday to similarly dock the dollars accorded to the Environmental Protection Agency and its efforts to collect data on industrial greenhouse-gas emissions. The Pompeo amendment passed on a 239-185 vote. “This data is the very foundation of the EPA’s effort to pursue its radical anti-jobs agenda,” Pompeo said. “Indeed, continuing the greenhouse-gas registry at currently funded levels will permit the EPA regulatory nose inside the job-destroying tent. We cannot head down this path.” However, a new survey of Americans sponsored by the American Lung Association found an overwhelming bipartisan majority wants the EPA to set stricter limits on air pollution and opposes congressional efforts to stop the EPA from updating carbon dioxide standards.
Rod Bremby confirmed last week what most people assumed: He didn’t voluntarily leave his position of secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. Bremby said that former Gov. Mark Parkinson’s office contacted him Nov. 2 and told him that he no longer would be KDHE secretary. “There was no rationale given,” Bremby said, though most everyone assumes it was to help ensure that KDHE approved an air-quality permit for Sunflower Electric Power Corp. to build a coal-fired power plant near Holcomb. Bremby was told that he could receive a severance package if he agreed not to discuss the issues until after Parkinson left office in January. Meanwhile, a study released last week challenges Sunflower’s contention that its new power plant would be the cleanest of its kind in the country. The report found that at least 669 coal-fired generating units have lower emissions of particulate matter than the current Sunflower permit allows and at least 321 coal-fired generating units have lower emissions of mercury than the Sunflower permit allows.
In The Eagle’s Opinion Line Extra, someone recently asked, “Hey, Al Gore — how’s the global warming gig working out?” Last week, as much of the nation was dealing with a historic snowfall, the former vice president countered criticism that such storms are evidence against man-made global warming. “Here’s a basic fact,” he said. “There is about 4 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere today than there was in 1970” — moisture, caused by warmer oceans and air, that is turning into big, heavy snow and rain, he said. On his blog, he wrote: “The scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.”
This is expected to be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 was the warmest decade on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. So why have there been record snowfalls in some states and countries in recent years? “As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past 2½ decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents,” explained Judah Cohen of an atmospheric and environmental research firm.
As part of an effort to reduce emissions, Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission voted last week to shut down four coal-fired power plants in the Denver area and switch some of the plants to natural gas. Meanwhile, Kansas seems bent on approving the expansion of the coal-fired power plant near Holcomb before stricter federal environmental rules go in place in January. Kansas Department of Health and Environment employees have been working evenings and weekends on the permit. Most of the power from the Kansas plant would be shipped to Colorado (while Kansas keeps the pollution).
Former GOP congressman Sherwood Boehlert is imploring his party brethren on Capitol Hill to stop denying the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists and start taking climate change seriously. In a Washington Post commentary, Boehlert concluded: “What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn’t deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them. The National Academy reports concluded that ‘scientific evidence that the Earth is warming is now overwhelming.’ Party affiliation does not change that fact.”
Observers including The Eagle editorial board suspected that the ouster of Kansas Health and Environment Secretary Rod Bremby last week had something to do with the pending air-quality permit for the Sunflower Electric Power Corp. coal-fired power plant expansion near Holcomb. The timing of Bremby’s departure certainly looked as if Gov. Mark Parkinson might be trying to pre-empt a second permit denial or expedite a permit approval before Jan. 2, when new federal rules for greenhouse-gas emissions will kick in. Parkinson defended himself in a blog post this week, denying that he has “preordained” the approval of Sunflower’s permit or artificially accelerated the process. Indeed, his reassuring statement left little room to doubt his commitment that KDHE would “conduct the review in a fair, thorough and independent manner. It will approve or deny the permit based on the law and the facts and not based on unfair input.” What Parkinson’s response curiously lacked was what we asked for in our Friday editorial: an explanation of why Bremby had to go, and whether it had anything to do with the coal plant.
In its roundup of GOP Senate candidates’ near-unanimous doubts about man’s role in climate change, Think Progress counted Jerry Moran as a “global warming denier,” citing his efforts to fight federal regulation of carbon dioxide as an air pollutant and a public health threat. The New York Times editorialized: “The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are rerunning the strategy of denial perfected by (Vice President Dick) Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.” The editorial concluded: “Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.”
The Environmental Protection Agency has been working for more than two decades to reduce particulate pollution in the air. But contrary to the claims of some farm-state lawmakers, it is not planning to crack down on farm dust. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson wrote a letter to Congress last week emphasizing that she wants to keep the current standard for particulate matter. EPA said in a statement that it “hopes that this action finally puts an end to the myth that the agency is planning to tighten this regulation.”
