From The Atlantic
Here is the most astonishing thing about these laws: They worked. Although they contained flaws, the laws accomplished their goals with greater success than critics predicted; and their rules cost businesses less money to implement than even hopeful supporters forecast.
The laws remain in place today, though the EPA still bickers with various industries over their scope. EPA employees consult the most recent science about conventional air or water pollution, formulate rules to protect the public from those dangers, and turn them into law. The American public benefits from this process, according to most research; and a large majority of Americans tell pollsters that they approve of it. The system seems to work.
Trump could be the most hostile president ever to sit over the agency. His only rival is Ronald Reagan, who did not enjoy the benefit of a Republican Congress. Suffice it to say that this scares a lot of Americans. Many of them have looked anew at the environmental policy machine running in the background of the government and asked, essentially: Wait, that old thing? How does that work?
This is a brief guide to how it works.
How do we protect the environment in the United States?
We mostly do it with statutes and regulations. A statute is a law passed by Congress, while a regulation is a law promulgated by a federal agency.
The process works like this: Congress passes a law with a general goal in mind—say, cleaner air around the country. This statute formally empowers the EPA, an independent agency of the federal government, to issue regulations about what companies must do to help bring about that cleaner air. Congress also gives money to the EPA to enforce those rules. Some of that money is supposed to go to states, who will enforce some of the regulations themselves.
What are the most important laws governing the EPA?
The Clean Air Act of 1970 tells the EPA to set standards for what kinds of toxic air pollutants can be released into the “ambient air,” either from factories or cars and trucks.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 tells the EPA to set standards for what pollutants can be released into lakes, streams, and rivers, and it forces polluters to get permits to do so.
When these statutes were passed, they were popular, bipartisan bills. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in a well-publicized ceremony.* “I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America,” he told reporters.
There are two more laws that don’t directly affect the EPA as much, but which come from the same period and expanded the government’s environmental power:
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) requires the federal government to conduct a lengthy environmental-impact study every time it wants to build, approve, or renovate something.
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 lets NOAA and the Fish and Wildlife Service protect species at risk for extinction, granting the U.S. government huge powers in the process. (This is partly because it was drafted by environmentalists and quickly signed by Nixon, who sought to give the press a Christmastime distraction from the Watergate scandal.)
Because the Constitution is very old, and the idea of the environment is very young.
“It’s a lengthy process, but it’s also an analytically demanding process for rules of the complexity that EPA typically encounters,” says Jonathan Cannon, who was general counsel at the agency from 1995 to 1998.
Because the agency knows it will get sued later. After the EPA publishes a new rule, industry groups often try to weaken the regulation and delay its enforcement in court. In these lawsuits, judges will check the thoroughness of the EPA’s “administrative record,” the paper trail of how an idea became a regulation.
Let’s go back to Congress for a moment. Were there any new environmental laws after Nixon left office?
The White House and the Department of the Interior can also issue broad directives for how that land should be used. President Obama focused many of his public-land executive orders on mitigating climate change: He issued a moratorium on coal mining on public land, and he restricted how much methaneyou can emit on public land. The Trump administration has already overturned some of these.
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
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