Alabama's Attorney General Fights Clean Air Measures
February 27th, 2010by Glynn Wilson
Alabama’s attorney general Troy “Toy Boy” King has now placed the state in the inauspicious company of the likes of Texas and corporate lobbying groups publicly fighting the opportunity to get on the international bandwagon to do something about climate change due to global warming as well as harmful air pollution.
The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson of New Orleans, told Congress earlier this week that regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, deemed a danger to the public health, will be phased in starting in 2011 for large plants and 2016 for smaller ones.
King joined Texas, Virginia and the pro-business manufacturing association in filing the petition with the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., asking the court to review EPA’s decision.
In response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of the federal government’s role in regulating air pollutants, the EPA announced in December that the agency would move forward to force states and industries to begin reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases that threaten public health.
Ground-level ozone has been linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses for many years. Greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere and increase ground-level global temperatures, including ocean temperatures which can lead to more violent hurricanes, include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
Business groups and conservative lawmakers try to argue the EPA’s ruling is based on “flawed science” and that cracking down on greenhouse gas emissions would somehow harm the economy, but that does not take into account all the ways moving toward clean energy sources could actually stimulate the economy and reduce America’s dependence on Mid-East oil, which leads to wars like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The mantra of “flawed science” comes from people who don’t put much faith in science anyway, who tend to wear their religion on their sleeves when running for political office.
Alabama’s conservative Republican senators, Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, who recently scored F’s for their voting records on the environment, are also on the record opposing the Supreme Court and EPA, although federal officials say they are confident the ruling will withstand legal challenges.
“EPA is proceeding with common-sense measures that are helping to protect Americans from this threat while moving America into a leadership position in the 21st century green economy,” according to a statement issued by EPA. “Unfortunately, special interests and other defenders of the status quo are now turning to the courts in an attempt to stall progress.”
Tags: Air Pollution, Alabama's Attorney General Fights Clean Air Measures, Asthma, Climate Change, Environmental Protection Agency, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases, U.S. Supreme Court
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