Smith of Public Citizen worries, in particular, about the House Appropriations Committee, which currently has a 21-to-14 Republican majority. Republicans, using the fiscal cliff and the need for a balanced budget as a pretext, might try to block critical funds required by the EPA to enforce its own regulations.
When I asked the environmentalists whom I interviewed their priority for the EPA during this second Obama administration, there was surprising agreement. All put cutting carbon pollution from power plants at the top of their list. The Environmental Defense Fund's senior vice-president, Eric Pooley, spoke to this consensus when he applauded the Obama administration for enacting tough regulations on newly-built power plants to cut C02 emissions, but added:
"It's time to extend these vital safeguards to existing power plants as well. Doing so would be a huge step forward on the road to confronting global climate change."
In addition to cutting greenhouse gases, environmentalist are hoping that the new administration will continue to block the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport vast quantities of "dirty oil" from northern Canada to the US Gulf coast. The president has said that he will make a final decision on Keystone during the current year.
There has been speculation that Jackson is resigning because the president has already decided to approve the controversial pipeline. Jackson "left as a matter of conscience," according to Jeff Tittel, the director of New Jersey's Sierra Club chapter and a longtime friend of the EPA administrator. Tittel says she "has too much principle to support [the pipeline], between the climate impacts of it and the water quality impacts of it " She was the person who pushed the hardest for the moratorium on the pipeline and now she's leaving."
Jackson herself says publicly only that the time has come to move on. Environmental activists hope that whoever replaces her will have Jackson's backbone in pushing forward on the gains she initiated during her controversial and courageous four-year tenure.
This article was published originally in Comment is Free, The Guardian UK
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