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Citizen’s petition to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency
Story Date: 11/28/2012
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Source: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE
The Heartland Institute is circulating a “Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency.” You can read and sign the online petition below, download a hard copy of the petition, or contact us at 312/377-4000 and ask us to send you a petition to sign, or for multiple copies to distribute to your family and friends.
EPA Is a Rogue Agency
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970 to protect the nation’s air and water from pollution. Over the years, Congress put EPA in charge of implementing and enforcing many laws, some of them important and needed, but others based on faulty science and adopted without regard to their enormous costs and small or nonexistent benefits.
In recent years, EPA has become a rogue agency, spending billions of dollars (approximately $9 billion in 2012) directly and imposing on individuals and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs. This huge burden is destroying jobs by blocking the use of American energy resources and giving foreign competitors an enormous cost advantage over U.S. businesses.
EPA has perverted the Clean Air Act by declaring carbon dioxide a “pollutant,” despite the plain intent of the law’s authors to exclude such naturally occurring gases, and despite major flaws in the science used to claim carbon dioxide endangers human health.
EPA is shutting down coal-fired electricity generation across the country by enforcing air quality standards that are unnecessarily stringent and impossible to meet. This action is causing electricity rates to rise rapidly and for electrical supplies to become unreliable.
The toll EPA is now taking on our country is staggering, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work at a time when millions of people are unemployed and our reliance on foreign sources of energy threatens to compromise the nation’s security.
The Solution
The solution is to rein in EPA through deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the agency. This can be done by Congress, through its control over the government’s purse, or by a president willing to put sound science and a strong economy ahead of the demands of environmental extremists.
According to Dr. Jay Lehr, science director of The Heartland Institute and a leading authority on water pollution and environmental protection, EPA’s budget could safely be cut by 80 percent or more without endangering the environment or human health. Most of what EPA does today, according to Dr. Lehr, could be done better by state government agencies, many of which didn’t exist or had much less expertise back in 1970, when EPA was created.
Congress can repeal EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide in the name of “global warming,” and it can demand cost-benefit analysis be applied to all environmental regulations. It can demand that EPA reform its politicized and unreliable scientific research program, and go back to sound science and common sense.
The Petition
The Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency calls out EPA’s unscientific and destructive campaign to frighten people over the threat of man-made global warming and demands “deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the EPA.”
So far, more than 16,000 people have signed it and returned copies of the petition to us. We're holding an event November 27 at 11 a.m. at the Capitol Visitors Center in Washington DC to formally submit the petition to members of Congress.
You can help! Please sign the petition, and urge your friends, relatives, and coworkers to sign it, too. You can sign it online here, or print out copies and fax signed copies to 312/377-5000, or mail them to us at The Heartland Institute, One South Wacker Drive #2740, Chicago, IL 60606.
By working together, we can rein in the Environmental Protection Agency! We can protect the environment without sacrificing jobs or our essential freedoms. Please help us by signing a petition today. You can also make tax-deductible contributions to The Heartland Institute by going here, or by sending your check or money order to the address above.
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