February 18, 2008

Editorial

I recently filed a motion with the US Court of Appeals for DC Circuit, the Court cited in the NY TIMES editorial below, requesting it refer OSC attorneys responsible for OSC’s lawbreaking failure to protect me to their licensing board for misconduct investigations. This is based on OSC’s now uncontested failure to comply with aspects of its statutory duty to protect me, as determined by a decision of Federal District Court, which OSC is neither appealing nor taking action to correct. If OSC attorneys complied with their duties to protect concerned federal employees in EPA, perhaps EPA would not write such contrary to law regulations.

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NY TIMES

Editorial, Feb 18, 2008

Judicial Rebukes on Clean Air

The federal courts have been a bulwark against
the Bush administration’s relentless efforts to
weaken 40 years’ worth of environmental law,
including statutes protecting the nation’s
forests, wetlands and endangered species. The
courts have been especially important in
resisting the administration’s assault on the
1970 Clean Air Act, which began with Vice
President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy report and continues to this day.

In 2006 and 2007, the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia and the
Supreme Court ordered the Environmental
Protection Agency to follow the law and require
utilities to install pollution controls when
upgrading power plants. Another Supreme Court
decision last year held that the Clean Air Act
required the E.P.A. to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions from automobiles, an obligation the agency continues to duck.

This month, the D.C. Circuit ruled that the
E.P.A. had once again ignored the law by failing
to require deep and timely reductions in mercury
emissions from coal-fired power plants. Like most
clean air cases, this one was mind-numbingly
complex. The gist of it was that the E.P.A.
seeking as usual to please industry had
approved a weak set of regulations that would let
many plants off the hook for emissions reductions
that would be required under any honest reading of the law.

The D.C. Circuit, by no means a radical group of
judges, has become so exasperated that it has
taken to quoting Lewis Carroll. In 2006, in a
reference to “Through the Looking Glass,” the
court said that the E.P.A.’s reading of the law
would make sense “only in a Humpty Dumpty world.”
This month, invoking “Alice in Wonderland,” the
court said the agency’s reasoning recalled “the
logic of the Queen of Hearts, substituting the
E.P.A.’s desires for the plain text” of the law.

Desire still burns bright at the E.P.A., which
reportedly intends to make one last-ditch effort
to weaken the rules requiring new pollution
controls on upgraded plants. Our advice to the
agency would be to take a dispassionate look at
its losing streak in the federal courts and, for once, leave the law alone.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Federal Government Whistleblower, Scott Bloch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.