EPPN urges support for Environmental Protection Agency
Episcopal News Service. May 21, 2010 [052110-01]
ENS staff
The Episcopal Public Policy Network is encouraging its members to call on their senators to vote against a bill that would limit the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases that it determines as a danger to the public health and welfare.
The May 20 EPPN policy alert, titled "Tell Congress - Let the EPA Do Its Job!" is a response to S.J. Res. 26, a bill amendment introduced by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski that would "undermine the EPA's authority to act in the best interest of the nation's public health by officially disapproving of the EPA's finding of endangerment and prohibiting its regulation of gases from taking effect."
The U.S. Senate is set to vote on the bill within the next two weeks.
The EPPN alert, which is emailed to about 25,000 Episcopalians and religious advocates, notes that in 2007, the Supreme Court "held that EPA had the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions ... Under that authority, the EPA has proposed to regulate the emissions from motor vehicles and power plants and factories to ensure that these large emitters are using the best available technologies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions."
The proposed bill "would exempt the nation's largest polluters from taking responsibility for their emission of harmful gases into our air," the alert states. "Such an action would interfere with the most effective and immediate effort to reduce the worst impacts of climate change in the absence of comprehensive climate change legislation. It would also short-circuit the move to the use of more sustainable forms of energy."
The Episcopal Church, via Resolution D014 passed at General Convention 2009, supports "an environmentally just treatment of all in God's Creation."
In a May 19 letter, an interfaith coalition, including the Episcopal Church, called on the U.S. Senate "to oppose any efforts to undermine the authority of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions" and to work for the defeat of Murkowski's proposed amendment which it says "threatens the well-being of at-risk communities, undermines efforts to shift to a sustainable energy future, and inevitably will impact the right of all of God's children to live in a healthy world."
The letter says that Congress "should instead focus its efforts on passing comprehensive climate legislation, a complementary path to the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases, as a means to ensure a just and sustainable future for God's Creation."
Through the EPPN website, individuals can e-mail their senators urging them to vote against any effort to weaken the EPA's authority to regulate the most harmful gases emitted into the air.
The EPA’s findings regarding greenhouse gases are published here.
"As Congress continues to debate over climate change legislation, the emission of greenhouse gases continues unabated, further damaging air quality and increasing smog and ozone problems," the EPPN alert says. "Now is not the time to interfere with EPA's efforts to make our air cleaner and reduce the harmful effects of greenhouse gases."