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In just one more example of how many things need to change - and will change - under an Obama administration, this article from eMagazine.com details how broken the Environmental Protection Agency has become under the Bush Administration. Created by President Richard Nixon in 1970 "to protect human health and the environment," the EPA was designed to be an agency that would establish its guidelines based on the best available science. Unfortunately, the past 8 years has been a disaster according to Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):

"I could do a catalog of everything from global warming to prescription drugs in the water to inadequate toxic clean up and you could go on and on," Ruch says, in reference to the EPA's enforcement failures. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Bush administration's challenges to the Clean Air Act. The current EPA has established smog standards that fall short of scientific recommendations, attempted to ease restrictions on industrial pollution and tap-danced around its ability to regulate greenhouse gases. In case after case, federal courts have sided with environmentalists and lawmakers against Bush's EPA.

In addition,

"What has been most remarkable," says Vickie Patton, the deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, "is the extent to which the judiciary has provided a very unmistakable check on the EPA's policies, [policies] that have really strained the nation's clean air laws in ways that Congress never intended."

The administration decided early on to create policy first and then alter the data to match the policy decisions. In fact, the E.P.A. should be reacting to environmental realities when they make policies, not the other way around:

Take the mercury emissions case. Mercury is a persistent neurotoxin that can find its way from fish to humans, where it can cause myriad health problems. Regulations under the Clean Air Act mandated stringent controls -- some would have reduced mercury emissions by 90%. In 2005, the EPA passed a regulation that would require coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions by only 70% and use a cap-and-trade system that would allow cleaner plants to trade unused emissions.

"These rules came right out of the White House," says Dr. Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). She says that EPA scientists were told to come up with the data to justify such a change in policy. "Their own inspector general at the EPA found that EPA scientists were pressured to change their analyses and their findings to agree with a predetermined value for a national cap on mercury emissions."

You don't want to miss this in-depth article which goes on to further detail how much the political arm of the Bush administration has dominated environmental policy at the EPA.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see who Obama picks to lead this most important agency we have to protect us from environmental malfeasance by Corporate America.

Can you say Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of RiverKeeper?

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