Happy 40th Birthday EPA

On the editorial page of today’s Wall Street Journal, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson celebrated the 40th birthday of the Environmental Protection Agency.  

Bravo to EPA on this important milestone.

As Administrator Jackson pointed out, “In Los Angeles, smog-thick air was a daily fact of life, while in New York 21,000 tons of toxic waste awaited discovery beneath the small community of Love Canal. Six months before the EPA's creation, flames erupted from pollution coating the surface of Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, nearly reaching high enough to destroy two rail bridges.”

Closer to my life today, I think of the clean-up of the dirty diesel engines that’s been the centerpiece of my two decades at NRDC.  

When we started our Dump Dirty Diesels Campaign in 1993, there was no such thing as a clean diesel.  Today, thanks to EPA rules adopted over the past decade, the diesel engines now sold in the US are the cleanest diesel engines in the world—a new truck engine sold today is 90-95% cleaner than it was just five years ago.

In these tough economic times, it’s important to remember that every dollar spent to retire, retrofit, or replace an old diesel engine will yield more than 12 dollars in health benefits.  

The national diesel clean-up underway now—a clean-up that exists solely because of EPA’s regulatory program—will eliminate roughly 35,000 premature deaths and $270 billion in health costs every year when all of EPA’s various diesel programs are fully implemented.

That’s money well spent in any economic climate.

Here’s a true story:

When my daughter was four, she asked me what my job was.  I pointed to a piece of construction equipment nearby that was spewing black soot and explained that my job was to work with people in government and in business to make sure that the black smoke would go away.  

The next day, her teacher surprised me by saying that my daughter had told her that I was a fireman.

In so many contexts over the past forty years, EPA has made the smoke go away. Thousands and thousands of kids haven’t been rushed to the emergency rooms of our cities and towns because our air is cleaner.  Thousands and thousands of our parents and grandparents are living longer because our air is cleaner.

EPA doesn’t always do what we want them to do, and sometimes they really miss the ball. Part of our job at NRDC is to keep that from happening.  And part of our job is to notice when EPA does its job well.

Here’s to 40 years of making that smoke go away.

Happy 40th Birthday, EPA.