Don’t Count on the EPA...Unless You are the Oil Industry or a Global Warming Denier, that is.

By John Reimann - Oakland Socialist, March 7, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

(The March 7th, 2014) Wall Street Journal carries an article on Obama’s head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy. They report:

“Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), a longtime and outspoken EPA critic, said he has been won over by Ms. McCarthy’s work. (NOTE: Inhofe is the foremost spokesperson for the oil industry in the US Senate and is one of the most prominent deniers of the fact of global warming.)

“Mr. Inhofe hosted two meetings last year in his office at the Capitol between Ms. McCarthy and executives of Devon Energy Corp. They told Ms. McCarthy the EPA was overestimating the level of greenhouse-gas emissions from hydraulically fracked wells in an annual report to the United Nations.

“The accounting matters to industry executives because part of the U.N. climate-change effort involves coordinating with governments to write national plans to address the emissions.

“The executives presented alternative methods for the calculations. They became the basis for Ms. McCarthy’s proposed change in 2014 in how the EPA will measure such emissions.

“‘She sat down and made modifications to the rule, and that was very helpful,” Mr. Inhofe said. “You don’t get that if you have a relationship of hostility.’”

So there we have it. The head of the Environmental “Protection” Agency is allowing the oil and gas industry to write important rules for her and is being praised by a global warming denier. What more could the corporate criminals ask for?

Disgracefully, one of the main environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council, also praised McCarthy.

“David Goldston, director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Ms. McCarthy is a straight-shooter. “You don’t feel like there’s a lot of massaging statements in meetings to obfuscate or try to leave different impressions with different people,” he said. He said she has been “strong and effective” at the EPA even if his environmental group would have liked the agency to go further on some regulations.”

So you’d better not count on them or their type either. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but all we have left is a mass, grass roots movement – a movement from below. One part of this movement will include mass civil disobedience to stop the polluters in their tracks. Another part will include electing our own people into office – separate from and independent of the Republicrats and big business. But for that, we’ll also have to take on all the other issues that ordinary, working class people face.