You Cannot be Pro-Life but Oppose the Environmental Protection Agency

Tuesday September 6, 2011

Either President Obama is playing a much deeper game than I appreciate (always a possibility) or he has completely caved to the Republicans when he recently over-ruled the EPA. 

Let's face it:  the Far Right will never give President Obama credit for what he does, so he should stick to first principles.  Most Americans do not realize, for example, that President Obama in effect lowered taxes, by preventing the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule, and proposed a deeper set of budget-balancing cuts (with no new taxes) than the measure ultimately adopted.  He doesn't get  credit for playing nice with the schoolyard bullies who still call him a socialist, Muslim, Kenyan-born, black-power-advancing, government-growing, tax-and-spend liberal (not that those are all bad things, but the maddening thing is that none are true).  

President Obama is a milquetoast right of centrist who is drifting further to the right in an attempt to appease people who will never invite him to play their reindeer games.  He did not get the memo but the all-white Tea Party did not take to the streets 28 days into his administration mad, mad, mad and wanting to "take their country back" because of anything he did or proposed to do.  They are simply furious about who he is, a black man with a D after his name, even though the daylight between his policies and the white guy who handed him two wars, a recession, and a set of disastrous, budget-busting, non-economy-growing tax cuts on his way out of the White House is at times indistinguishable.  

Obama risks losing his base in a calculated move to pre-empt Texas commercials about all the Texas coal-burning plants that would have to close (or so they claim) to comply with stricter EPA rules they knew were coming but somehow never bothered to make the necessary changes.  As with the budget, it was a game of chicken and Obama blinked.  

The spectacle of a few thousand Texans unemployed, rolling blackouts (during record heat waves and out-of-control forest fires) is probably a gift Obama would rather not give to Perry and the Texas fossil fuel industry.   Rolling back the regulations' implementation until at least after the election was a wise move politically but a stunningly retro move environmentally.  The EPA estimated that the regulations due to go into effect in 2012 would have prevented 34,000 premature deaths a year.  As long as those bodies are not seen falling from towers in lower Manhattan, it's almost impossible to get a television-addicted American audience to be moved into action.   Why save a life when your power bill might go up a nickel a day, or you might be forced to turn your thermostat up 2 degrees in summer and down a couple in winter?  Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting such a thing a few decades ago.  He wasn't wrong, just early.  

I wish President Obama would get out ahead of these fossil fuel apologists and pre-empt their arguments.  He should be making any or all of the following points:

• The EPA is a pro-life agency.    Sensible regulations of the emissions of pollutants and carcinogens saves far more lives than futile attempts to prohibit abortion.  (Why futile? Consider the experience in Latin America where abortion rates are higher despite almost universal prohibition, and of Western Europe where rates are lower despite far fewer restrictions than in the United States.)  Put bluntly, you cannot be pro-life and anti-climate.
• Protecting the environment and energy independence are national security issues.   It makes no sense to send young men and women halfway across the world to protect our access to our energy drug of choice when we could enter a program of recovery and declare our energy independence both by decreasing demand and diversifying supply away from non-renewable sources. 
• Protection of the environment and sustainability are religious mandates.  Sustainability should resonate with evangelical Christians (as it is beginning to among some such as Jim Wallis), Obama should remind Americans of faith.  It is a strange and narrow belief system that respects only fetal life, but has such scant regard for the health and safety of post-natal life, or of life in rivers, streams, and oceans, god's creation (according to every major religion) toward which we must show responsible stewardship, not mercenary disdain.  Not a word in the Bible commands us only to do what is right if it does not threaten job creation, or asks us to balance the life of a child against another shekel of potential profit.  There is nothing wrong per se with making a materialistic argument, but let's not cloak it in Judeo-Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist clothing.   I cannot speak with authority for those adhering to  Baha'i, Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Zoroastrianism, or any of a few thousand indigenous belief systems, but I do know that those of us who are the spiritual equivalent of independent voters find the utilitarian calculus life versus profits to be deeply troubling and morally offensive.  If human life really is sacred, then it cannot and should not be pitted against the marginal inconvenience of tuning down a thermostat or putting on a sweater.  
• Government should not be protecting one industry (fossil fuel corporations and their lobbyists) over another (millions of green jobs we can not even imagine yet).  When the government forces companies to pay the true cost of the air they pollute, then yes, all things being equal, the price of each unit of energy using fossil fuel technology will rise from where it had been when the companies were using our rivers, oceans, and atmosphere as a free dumping ground.   The fossil fuel industry, which last time I checked was plenty profitable, chooses to pass that cost onto consumers or to fire workers or close plants, so be it, but if their model is not economically viable once externalities are eliminated, then that is the free market talking.  They also have another option:  pay their top executives less or return less money to shareholders, or some combination of the above.  The fossil fuel industry is presenting us with a false dichotomy anyway, threatening massive job layoffs and rolling blackouts unless they can continue to use our resources without paying for them.  Many rice plantations in the South collapsed and the cultivation of cotton became less profitable after plantation owners were forced to pay their workers but this does not mean that the government should have refused to end slavery simply because the cost of this new regulation would have economic consequences.  Many candlestick-makers went out of business when the light bulb was invented but does this mean the government should have manipulated the market to protect the candlestick industry as the coal industry wants the government to do now (failing to price something like air or water that has definite value but cannot be efficiently priced without a referee in the game is just as manipulative as artificially increasing the price of something the government does not want you to buy, such as imported goods hit with tariffs or light bulbs slapped with fines).   I don't know what percentage of the economy should be oil, natural gas, coal, solar, wind power, geothermal, or pure research, but let the marketplace decide.  Ironically, the marketplace cannot decide if we continue to act as if water and air are free, in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry which gobbles up or pollutes these things over competition that does not.  
• Those who think we should not innovate, adapt, and grow are Luddites and defeatists. The status quo fossil fuel shills are convinced that America must fail where the Japanese, Europeans, and even the Chinese (finally) are making major breakthroughs.   Why do Republicans think Germans are so much smarter than Americans?  Why have they already declared defeat before even entering the arena?  The rest of the world is not waiting.  If we hesitate, they will eat our lunch. 

I hope President Obama can come out swinging.  Part of me is thinking he is getting all the ugly stuff out of the way early before his campaign really kicks off, but when he goes on the attack against those who have said so many untruths about him, I hope he can choose not just to engage but to frame the debate.