President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970. In nominating Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be EPA administrator this week, President-elect Donald J. Trump chose a man who has sued the EPA several times and attacked its 鈥渁ctivist agenda.鈥� Trump said during his election campaign he would like to abolish the agency.
All of which might lead you to wonder: Why do we have an EPA, anyway?
Nixon didn鈥檛 really want to create it. The first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, a third-generation Republican lawyer and politician from Indiana, later recalled that Nixon created the EPA 鈥渂ecause of public outrage about what was happening to the environment. Not because Nixon shared that concern, but because he didn’t have any choice.鈥� That April, 20 million Americans had gone outside to participate in the first Earth Day celebrations.
Nixon had other things on his mind. Six days after Earth Day, he authorized American troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia, an action that brought more demonstrators into the streets. To Nixon, according to Ruckelshaus, anti-war protesters and environmentalists were birds of a feather鈥斺�渂oth reflected weakness in the American character.鈥�
After establishing the EPA, Nixon took little interest in its work. 鈥淓very time I’d meet with him, he would just lecture me about the “crazies” in the agency and advise me not to be pushed around by them,鈥� said Ruckelshaus. 鈥淗e never once asked me, “Is there anything wrong with the environment? Is the air really bad? Is it hurting people?”
In fact, it was. There were many things wrong with the environment in 1970. Here are five ways our world has changed for the better since then, thanks in part to the EPA.
- AIR
Before the government began to rein in pollution from smokestacks and tailpipe, dense, dark and even choking smog was a frequent occurrence in American cities and towns. In 1948, spectators at a football game in Donora, Pennsylvania couldn鈥檛 see the players or the ball because of smog from a nearby coal-fired zinc smelter; 20 people died. In Los Angeles in the 1960s, smog often hid the mountains.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 gave EPA the authority to regulate harmful air pollutants. One of the most dramatic success stories was lead, which was widely used in paint but also in gasoline to improve engine performance. EPA estimated that more than 5,000 Americans were dying every year from heart disease linked to lead poisoning; many children were growing up with diminished IQ.
By 1974, the EPA began a phaseout of lead from gasoline. The gradual effort took until 1995 to completely end the practice, but the result has been a measurable 75 percent drop in blood lead levels in the public.
Thanks to Clean Air Act rules, the levels of many other toxic substances in our air, such as mercury, benzene, and arsenic, have also dropped substantially. A major update to the law in 1990 allowed EPA to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants, the main cause of acid rain. Life has begun to come back in acidified lakes in the Adirondacks.
Complying with EPA鈥檚 air pollution rules has been costly鈥攖hey鈥檙e the biggest burden the agency imposes on the economy. But the federal Office of Management and Budget, analyzing data collected from 2004 to 2014, estimates that the health and other benefits of the rules exceeded the costs by somewhere between $113 billion and $741 billion a year.
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