The U.S. EPA, Florida's hypocrisy and state's rights ... by gimleteye

Last week the state of Florida filed a lawsuit against the U.S. EPA, claiming that in its intent to enforce against water pollution that infects state waters, that the EPA had violated traditional states rights and "cooperative federalism".

Outgoing Attorney General Bill McCollum said, "We all want clean water for Florida, and we all believe that scientifically sound and responsible numeric nutrient criteria will improve efforts to achieve this goal. Florida was in the process of developing such criteria under an EPA-approved plan when the EPA decided to preempt the state’s plan.”

What hypocrisy. For more than a decade the state of Florida has doodled with pollution in order to favor large agribusinesses, like the Fanjul billionaire sugar barons, and to foster the kinds of cheap growth that pushed the state economy straight off the cliff. You see; if you don't have to account for cleaning up pollution when you build drainage systems to protect farms and suburbs, the costs get shifted off to some indefinite date in the future, when gullible taxpayers will be persuaded it is their problem.

If sound science had been used to regulate growth and to limit pollution at its source, if state agencies had done their jobs and had not been infected by politics, then the costs of growth and of pollution would have been fairly allocated and paid for by industries that caused the pollution. All the costs. That never happened in Florida, despite the blizzard of paper and busy work to the contrary, and EPA rightly stepped in.

Here is the biggest difference between the Obama administration and two terms of George W. Bush when science was at the whim of ideologues; today the nation has an EPA that is determined to do its job protecting what the states won't, or can't, because of political interference at the local and state level.

What rankles most is the Florida GOP claim to states' rights in the matter of pollution. One can't help but note that it dovetails nicely with the Tea Party gymnastics to pin the blame on an over-reaching federal government. If Florida's Republican legislature and executive branch really believed in states rights, then it would have long ago enacted the 1996 constitutional amendment approved by voters, "that those in the Everglades Agricultural Area (ie. Big Sugar) who cause water pollution within the Everglades Protection Area or the Everglades Agricultural Area shall be primarily responsible for paying the costs of the abatement of that pollution." How can the Florida GOP argue for state's rights when this stark example of avoidance, denial, and lies stands on the books, in clear light?

You see, what voters and taxpayers want in Florida -- clean water-- is not what the entrenched interests who run the state want. We have federal laws to deal with that situation, made cumbersome by the continual efforts of polluters to rake in private profits at the public's expense. That is the heart of the hypocrisy. The polluters must pay.