Better in their words…

Schwarzenegger Is Mistaken About EPA and Clean Air — Letters to the Editor – WSJ.com.

Some great letters here.

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The straw-man argument that legislation to rein in the EPA’s worst abuses would somehow dirty the air is an unworthy one for a strongman like Arnold Schwarzenegger (“The Clean Air Act Keeps Us Healthy,” April 21).

The Clean Air Act’s success reflects its original focus on practical solutions that balance costs and benefits to achieve significant improvements in air quality at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s EPA has thrown that approach out the window. Its new mercury rule, for example, would cost tens of billions of dollars a year, all of which would be passed on in electricity prices, for a benefit that the EPA estimates to be negligible. That’s because U.S. mercury emissions—currently less than 2% of global emissions—have been falling for decades, even without costly federal regulation. Mr. Schwarzenegger apparently buys EPA’s line that reductions don’t “count” unless coerced by the agency.

Yet the aim of this EPA is not to eke out improvements in air quality but to drive up energy prices, a goal consistently articulated by candidate Barack Obama during his presidential campaign. The EPA’s power grab on carbon dioxide—in which the agency actually admits to overriding parts of the Clean Air Act—and broader war on coal-generated power cannot be explained in any other way.

Still, Mr. Schwarzenegger says to leave these decisions to the scientists. Which ones? The EPA’s captive scientists assert that dioxin in meat, fish and eggs is a major health risk, while the independent National Academies of Sciences concluded that the risk is overblown. The discrepancy comes down to politics.

That is, making trade-offs is a political, not technocratic, act. Mr. Schwarzenegger is right that Congress made intelligent trade-offs when it enacted the Clean Air Act. But it should not sit idly by while unelected EPA bureaucrats discard the balance the act strikes to further their radical agenda.

Andrew Grossman

The Heritage Foundation

Washington

Congress can’t be trusted to interfere with the EPA’s scientific standards, says Arnold Schwarzenegger. So we are to put all our trust in an unelected, austere, intellectual and totally unbiased guild of wizards who claim to be all-knowing and politically unmotivated? They are not to be challenged by the machinations of a democratically elected Congress? And he was a governor, a man who was at the spearhead of the democratically elected process?

Michael Greczek

Houston

Mr. Schwarzenegger writes that Congress should not substitute political calculations for scientific and medical facts. Mr. Schwarzenegger fails to distinguish why this is different than anything else Congress does. As an example, Congress is a political body, and the majority of its members are not well-schooled in economics. It utilizes populist politics on an electorate, which is also not well-schooled in economics, to get re-elected and to use its powers to create regulations that often have adverse effects on our prosperity.

Mr. Schwarzenegger applauds the fact that mercury emissions from power plants are now being regulated. I would have been interested to have him explain why California’s Title 24, mandating mercury containing compact fluorescent lights in new building construction, was created without consideration for proper disposal of them. Not only do CFLs present a danger to occupants when broken in the home, folks are disposing them improperly, and the lights are ending up in landfills where they contaminate air and water with mercury.

Dave Zittin

Cupertino, Calif.

Most people now realize that the science of anthropogenic climate change is not “settled” and that the methods and motivations of the climate-change movement are highly questionable. By throwing carbon dioxide into the pollutant category, the agency is throwing itself under the bus. The regulators and legislators must restrict their reach to real pollutants, or live with the destruction of their credibility and the resulting backlash against the unjustified regulatory behemoth required to tackle the CO2 chimera.

Peter Staats

Loveland, Ohio