EPA must overcome lobbying to fight pollution

BY NICOLE LOWEN
Nicole Lowen is a state associate at Ann Arbor-based Environment Michigan.

This holiday season, many Americans have made New Year’s resolutions for healthier lifestyles — vowing to exercise more and eat healthier foods, and swearing away bad habits like smoking. Sadly, while there are many things we can do to maintain good health, we face a number of unseen threats to our health that we can do little about.

There are myriad pollutants that attack our health from all fronts every day. Soot and smog are a particular problem here in Michigan, where, according to the Clean Air Task Force, 678 people die and 1,097 more have heart attacks every year because of these nasty pollutants. This air pollution also means that more of the nearly 721,000 Michiganders who suffer from asthma are rushed to the emergency room gasping for air every year.

Mercury and lead in the air, contaminates our water where it then seeps into the food chain and puts children at risk of brain damage and developmental disorders. In fact, one in every six women has enough mercury in her body to put her baby at risk of neurological damage should she become pregnant. Additionally, unchecked global warming also is threatening our health with the spread of infectious diseases, an increase in asthma attacks and respiratory disease, and more heat-related deaths from record high temperatures.

All of these pollutants share a common culprit: every year coal-fired power plants and polluting industrial facilities spew hundreds of thousands of tons of dangerous pollution into our air and water, contaminating our environment and making us sick.

Fortunately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is stepping up to protect our health by requiring that big polluters clean up their act. During the next three years, the EPA is planning to issue new standards to cut dangerous pollution — including mercury pollution, soot and global warming pollution. These standards will save thousands of lives each year, prevent millions of incidents of illness and avoid many billions of dollars in health care costs.

But as the EPA moves forward to clean our air, some of the biggest culprits, including coal and oil companies, are mounting a huge opposition and pushing the agency to weaken or block new life-saving standards.
What’s worse, many of the pollution rules that EPA is planning already have been put on hold for decades. For example President George W. Bush’s administration delayed cleanup standards for a variety of harmful pollutants, and even when standards were proposed, they were often so weak that courts found them unlawful and returned them to EPA for improvement.

Now, as the Obama administration has pledged to finally clean our air and protect public health, those same Bush-era EPA officials are lobbyists for the biggest coal utilities, continuing their legacy of life-threatening delays.These corporate insiders have put our health at risk for too long; Michiganders and all Americans deserve cleaner air and better health.

It’s time to stop letting big coal and oil companies stand in the way of a healthier future. The current EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, can protect our families and prioritize health and the environment. Her New Year’s resolution should be to issue the strongest possible standards to control dangerous pollution and protect public health. Just as Americans will resolve to improve their health this holiday, we hope that Jackson will do so for the nation as well.