Top 60 EPA Quotes

As Attorney General of Alabama, I have never hesitated to stand up to the EPA before when it was wrong.

In order to build anything from factories to schools to hospitals, one must jump through a series of regulatory hoops, giving EPA veto power over any major projects.

As congressional Republicans and the Trump administration continue to attack the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it came as no surprise that the House voted on two bills that would weaken emissions standards and, as a result, put our public health at risk.

There are issues the EPA should be dealing with. When I talk about the EPA and its role with the states, it’s not an abolitionist view, that we don’t need that agency. It’s that the agency should act within the outlines established by Congress.

It should be noted that the EPA’s banning of methanol is categorically absurd from the point of view of environmental protection.

Let’s shut down the EPA.

We must, we must cut the EPA’s legs off. I hate to say that, because it sounds rotten, but they are choking this country to death with legislating through the bureaucracy in Washington.

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

EPA’s role is even broader than water infrastructure and cleaning up contaminated land – the agency also has a key role in allowing projects to move forward by reviewing environmental impact statements during the permitting process.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

We can be thankful President Barack Obama is taking aim at one of the prime causes of climate change and extreme weather: air pollution. The EPA’s carbon pollution standards are the most significant step forward our country has ever taken to protect our health by addressing climate change.

In my view, it is unreasonable for EPA to exclude considerations of costs in determining whether it is ‘appropriate‘ to impose significant new regulations on electric utilities.

When I was mayor of Tulsa, Tulsa County was in nonattainment of the 1979 ozone NAAQS, so I have seen firsthand the economic impacts associated with the challenges of attainment and the legacy of EPA intervention that continues long after meeting the standard.

Most lawsuits against the EPA historically have come either because of the agency’s lack of regard for a statute or because the EPA failed in an obligation or deadline.

The EPA has performed a very important role for us all.

The EPA has no legal authority to expand the definition of navigable waters under the Clean Water Act, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear.

The EPA’s climate change regulations are based on compromised scientific reports and heavily flawed data.

Without question, I’m not a fan of the EPA. The EPA has overstepped their boundaries each and every day. They get into areas they shouldn’t be involved in… the states have the right to regulate themselves if they have the ability to do so – and we do because we have the Department of Environmental Quality.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has the ability to more stringently regulate dust. If the EPA determines more stringent standards are necessary, family farmers and ranchers, as well as rural economies, would be devastated.

When the EPA says that property owners, farmers, and livestock producers must stomach higher costs, longer delays, and bigger headaches, it’s up to Congress to put up a roadblock.

The fact is there are a lot of things happening at the federal level that are absolutely beyond the jurisdiction of the Constitution. This is power that should be shifted back to the states, whether it’s the EPA – there is no role at the federal level for the Department of Education.

If the EPA continues unabated, jobs will be shipped to China and India as energy costs skyrocket. Most of the media attention has focused on the EPA’s efforts to regulate climate-change emissions, but that is just the beginning.

Were the United States to pass a law requiring all cars to be methanol-capable flex-fuel vehicles, or simply repeal EPA regulations that prevent such conversions from being carried out privately, our immense natural-gas capacity could make a dramatic entrance into the liquid-fuel market.

Here at the EPA, the agency will continue to do its best to promote the health and welfare of all Americans.

Regulations have certainly gone too far in a number of areas, but it’s important to remember that regulations are meant to be protective, and when it comes to the EPA, that means protecting human health and our world.

Contaminated water is not a problem limited to Flint. Think of New Jersey, where school fountains were found to contain unsafe levels of lead. Or the EPA’s 33,000 superfund sites, which are highly-polluted areas that require long-term clean-up operations. The problem is so large that it feels insurmountable.

When you declare a ‘war on coal’ from a regulatory perspective, the question has to be asked: where’s that in the statute? Where did Congress empower the EPA to declare a war on coal?

When fully implemented, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan will prevent up to 6,600 premature deaths and 150,000 juvenile asthma attacks annually.

Since the first Earth Day, the EPA has regulated lead out of paint, air, and gasoline. It started fuel-economy testing (and then caught those cheating on them), phased out ozone-depleting aerosols, and removed cancer-causing pesticides from the marketplace.

Even when EPA subjects its science to peer review, the agency often stacks the deck of supposedly independent advisory panels by including members who are EPA grant recipients.

EPA takes its Clean Air Act responsibilities seriously and is committed to providing certainty to state and industry partners. We will not use our authority to pick winners and losers in the energy marketplace.

Climate change is not an excuse for the EPA to ignore the bounds of law and issue illegal regulations that will cost jobs, shutter industries, and have little to no positive impact on the environment.

For an American, as mad you may be about whatever the EPA or the IRS does, just imagine if you only had a one twenty-eighth vote over what it does. You were in this place with this big bureaucracy that sets rules, and you only have a small vote. You’d feel like you’ve given up your sovereignty, wouldn’t you?

When we have agencies like EPA shutting down businesses, I don’t trust them at all.

We notified the EPA 18 years ago that PFOA in drinking water presented a public health threat, and in 2019 there are still no federal regulatory limits.

EPA will set a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions that allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford – while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars.

In addition to virtually banning methanol outright, the EPA has created regulations to prevent cars from being modified by small businesses to optimize their performance, including through the use of methanol.

I will use my position as chairman emeritus on the Energy and Commerce Committee to try to bring some common sense to EPA regulations.

I hope the EPA will listen to the many votes over the years in Congress opposing cap-and-trade and rescind that proposed rule.

Five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina – have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks – stacks over 500 feet – were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.

It seems the EPA has worked hard to devise new regulations that are designed to eliminate coal mining, coal burning, usage of coal.

The Obama administration’s EPA ruling to cut carbon emissions at power plants is a direct affront to workers in states like Alabama, which not only rely upon coal-fired plants to generate most of their electricity but are also home to thousands of coal industry jobs.

I would have never run for office if it wasn’t for the fact that my biggest threat to my company was the federal government and the overreach of the EPA. They’ve gone too far, and it’s time for them to be pulled back in.

However much we might sympathize or agree with EPA’s policy objectives, EPA may act only within the boundaries of its statutory authority.

The EPA issued the MATS rule in 2012, and it is the first national standard created to address power plant emissions of toxic air pollutants. Under MATS, power plants are required to install equipment to reduce emissions of specific pollutants, such as mercury and sulfur dioxide.

There is no reason why EPA’s role should ebb and flow based on a particular administration or a particular administrator.

Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.

If the EPA cannot or will not act to halt the toxic e-waste trade to developing nations, then Congress should take action.

Way back in 2000, the EPA was poised, and, in fact, had drafted a rule, to specially regulate pollution – water pollution and other types of pollution – from power plants, but the energy industry pushed back pretty significantly.

I think people really understand that clean air and clean water and not having factories dumping their emissions into the atmosphere and into the rivers and into the sea has been a very good thing for America. EPA stands watch for very important principles that go all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Administrator McCarthy and the EPA will soon find out that Washington bureaucrats are becoming far too aggressive in attacking our way of life. Administrator McCarthy should be apologizing to Missourians. EPA aggression has reached an all-time high, and now it must be stopped.

As soon as it was clear, in Copenhagen in 2009, that the Senate was blocking Obama from introducing meaningful climate legislation, the push was for him to use executive authority, use the EPA, use the tool of federal leases, and there was just a refusal to do it.

The EPA historically has been an agency where people go to work at the agency and spend their entire career, 30, 40 years at the agency.

Without the EPA and the national pollution safeguards it enforces, more children would have asthma. Our water would be less safe. More chemicals would poison our bodies. And more people would die prematurely from respiratory diseases and heart attacks.

I’m very concerned about the – I want to leave EPA in a better position than in which I found it, when I eventually do leave the agency.

Dust is part of rural America. It is completely unreasonable for the EPA to put a price tag on communities for carrying out activities essential to their well-being. This is a prime example of federal regulations gone too far.

There’s been a false sense of security in the American people when it comes to environment issues and our water, because they believe that the EPA is there to protect us, and unfortunately, that system‘s not working right now. They’re overburdened, understaffed, and underfunded.

To forget that the EPA was borne out of public demand is to invite a real backlash.

We need to improve our horrible position within the petroleum game by eliminating the EPA and other crippling bureaucracies that have turned the U.S. from the game’s biggest winners into its worst losers.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and EPA, et cetera, had worked out what allowable releases are.