| The common wisdom has it that under the new Obama Administration, environmental regulation and oversight will become stricter than it was under the Bush Administration. Although in some respects that may be true, the economic realities of today may have a substantial impact on the Administration's goals as stated during the campaign.
In certain areas, new efforts will be taken up to increase regulation and environmental oversight. On January 23, 2009, the new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lisa Jackson, set forth her priorities in a published memo to all EPA employees. Those priorities include (1) reducing greenhouse gas emissions; (2) improving air quality; (3) managing chemical risks; (4) cleaning up hazardous waste sites; and (5) protecting America's water. Those broad goals are consistent with the themes that President Obama ran on.
With respect to the first priority, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we can certainly expect greater activity from EPA, if only because the Bush Administration took the position throughout much of its tenure that EPA had no statutory authority to regulate emission of greenhouse gases. Even since the Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 in Massachusetts v. EPA that EPA did have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, very little has taken place on the regulatory front and therefore we can reasonably expect that EPA will issue rules with greater urgency under Lisa Jackson's leadership. The Obama administration has also indicated it may allow individual states to issue regulations on greenhouse gases.
But efforts on greenhouse gases may seem less attractive in the current economic universe. What seemed obvious in an era of $4.00 per gallon gasoline may be more difficult in times of $1.75 gasoline, automaker bailouts and tight credit.
Lisa Jackson has substantial experience with Superfund from her earlier days at EPA. The common wisdom says that the Superfund program, designed to identify and cleanup the most contaminated sites, will be invigorated in the new Administration. That may be true on a broad level, but few people who work in Superfund will tell you that there was any real reduction in enforcement during the Bush Administration and certainly not in EPA Region 1 that covers the greater Boston area.
It also remains to be seen whether the Superfund program can be enhanced in the near term given the economic realities. The EPA in large measure relies on private companies to pay for clean up of Superfund sites. As the economic crisis deepens, many of these companies are facing difficult economic decisions including plant closures and layoffs and some may well be driven into bankruptcy. This will undoubtedly place greater financial burdens on the other companies involved in the clean up efforts as well as on EPA's own already depleted coffers to undertaken remedial action.
The difficulty for the new EPA leadership will be the more practical problems brought on by the economic realities of the day. Whatever the final mixture of programs and tax cuts in the economic stimulus package pending in Congress, a substantial effort to undertake "shovel ready" projects will be at the forefront. Just how EPA will be able to balance its stated desire to improve air quality, manage chemical risks, clean up hazardous waste sites and protect America against the pressing need to create jobs through infrastructure projects that may have adverse environmental impacts remains to be seen. The tension between "shovel ready" and environmental protection will probably not work in EPA's favor, at least in the short term. Despite the rhetoric of creating green jobs, undoubtedly much of the infrastructure spending will be for good old fashioned roads, bridges, railways, port facilities and the like. It will be difficult for EPA to stand in the way of such projects in this political climate.
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