The EPA Needs to Go

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long preferred totalitarian approaches to its functions, instead of taking market based approaches that encourage people to see doing the "right thing" as being in their own self interests. The EPA simply doesn't believe in the free market, or that doing things for selfish reasons can be moral in any sense of the word. After pondering this strange dilemma for a long time, I came to the conclusion that this problem stems from the fact that many environmentalists are communists, and "green" is the new way to impose a drag on the United States so it doesn't out compete Communist countries. The most recent manifestation of the wretched attack of the EPA on the American economy can be seen in the EPA's Unconscionable War on Fracking over at the American Thinker by Jeffrey Folks.

A quote of a few paragraphs will give you a flavor of the article:

But it's not just that the EPA has a habit of releasing incomplete reports based on inadequate research. Those draft reports are not just incomplete. It seems that they contain scientific errors and apparent fabrications that raise serious doubts about the ability of the agency to do its job. The Pavillion fracking case is a good example.

While charging the drillers in question with contaminating groundwater, the EPA suppressed information in a manner that would compel any court of law to dismiss the case and issue a serious reprimand, if not bring charges of contempt, against the prosecution. Surely, the EPA was aware, or should have been aware, of the fact that well water in Pavillion has been "contaminated" with polluting chemicals for half a century. This natural "pollution" is not the consequence of fracking, as the EPA charges, but of natural contamination.

Not only did the EPA report suppress this evidence -- evidence that argues strongly against contamination on the part of drilling company -- but it failed to address further scientific evidence that would rule out contamination. Not only were Pavillion's water wells already polluted decades before drilling began, but the pollution that the EPA says entered the system from drilling involved chemicals never used in fracking. (They are, however, used in the construction of water wells of the kind that might be found in Pavillion, not in oil and gas wells.) And yet the EPA persisted with its charges, knowing that the very chemical it discovered in well water could not have entered the wells in the manner suggested.

When the Constitution, and the rule of law, is ignored, or openly flouted, it is hard not to conclude that we are no longer living in the United States, but in a tyrannical country located in the place of what used to be the United States. That this has gone on for decades, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, and has only gotten worse tells me that both parties are to blame.

The EPA has been involved in chicanery and skulduggery since its inception in 1970 under (Republican) President Richard Nixon. The first "victory" of the environmental movement under William Ruckelshaus was the virtual banning of DDT. While I admit that the use of DDT was too frequent, and it was used in too many situations, it none the less is true that before DDT, malaria was endemic in the United States. By the end of WWII, it was virtually eradicated from CONUS. However, one of the most notorious cases involves the Hooker Chemical Company and the Love Canal. Reason Magazine did an expose in 1981 in Love Canal: The Truth Seeps Out by Eric Zuesse. It is a long article, but an instructive read on the way the EPA operates. In this case, they used public ignorance, due in part to misreporting by the MSM, to try to lay the blame at the feet of Hooker Chemical. But Hooker took extraordinary measures to bury their wastes in a landfill that far exceeded the state of the art, and to warn the Board of Education that the property was unsuitable for any use other than a park. Indeed, it was the City of Niagara Falls itself, who penetrated the clay cell walls while building a sewer and precipitated the release of the chemical wastes that led to people being evacuated from their homes. None of that mattered to EPA. In their way of looking at the world, Hooker Chemical was to blame for making chemicals that have made every body's lives better, and worse, making a profit doing so.

Folks concludes his article:

When federal agencies begin to wield power in an unconstitutional manner, depriving citizens and corporations of property in the most callous manner imaginable, one of our fundamental liberties has been lost. It is time for the EPA to be not only reined in, but eliminated, and for whatever legitimate functions it has to be handed over to more responsible departments of government at the state level.

When an agency begins to attack private citizens with no regard for the law, there is no limit to the damage that can result. Today it may "only" be the property of oil and gas companies that are at stake. Tomorrow it will be not just the property, but the life and liberty of all Americans. If the extralegal activity of federal agencies like the EPA is not curtailed, all Americans will soon be at risk of imprisonment at the whim of any one of the president's czars. That is the attitude toward law that exists in a totalitarian state, not in a democracy.

Breaking up the EPA would be a great start for a new President and Congress. Will they have the guts to do it?