Merkley on Republican Anti-Science "Political Stunts"

Today one of my Republican colleagues introduced a proposal to brazenly overturn sound scientific work done by our nation's leading public health experts and prohibit the Environment Protection Agency from doing its job to protect the health and welfare of the American people. This extremely damaging proposal is a political stunt designed to effectively strip the EPA's power to curb harmful air pollution.

Senator Murkowski's proposal takes the form of a "Resolution of Disapproval" under the Congressional Review Act. It is so extreme that it would legally overturn scientists' very conclusion, based on decades of scientific study, that greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health and the environment, and it would have the effect of prohibiting the EPA from making the same conclusion in the future. It could block any action by the EPA to protect our families, our communities, and our economy from greenhouse gas pollution.

This resolution represents an irresponsible attempt to take away the power of an independent agency whose sole purpose is to protect the health of our families, friends and neighbors and the environment we live in.

excerpt from Senator Jeff Merkley, "A Dangerous Proposal", Huffington Post, 21 January 2010.

Posted on January 21, 2010 at 21.10 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events

One Response

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Friday, 22 January 2010 at 00.51
    Permalink

    Thanks to the Supremes, we're going to have a Senate full of Murkowskis within a few years. Science? What's good for the public? What's good for the environment? Nonstarter alls. Even more than today, everything will be decided on the basis of what it does for or against the corporate bottom line.

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.