Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Functions

Dear Rep.Neugebauer,
    Thank you for your email concerning the abuses of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
    You said, "In recent years, I believe the EPA increasingly represents the overreaching arm of a government. In short, the EPA has been tirelessly promulgating environmental regulations without considering the consequences they will have on our economy, and more specifically, jobs."
    You also said, "Please rest assured that I. I hope you continue to write me about the issues most important to you."
    As a PhD chemist, I occasionally have a lopsided view of human reality. However, I have found through many years of experience that my background serves me well in analyzing various human problems related to chemistry.
    Chemical and pharmaceutical companies produce a great variety of chemical compositions, sometimes called compounds. Many of them react with humans and other animals to great advantage in curing diseases and generally improving quality of life. However, there is always a downside in that for every chemical compound that does some good, it always does some bad. In addition, production of those compounds many times involves a release to the environment of toxic byproducts.
     It is the function of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to determine the relative merits of chemical compositions used in treating humans. That is, if a human being takes a "medicine" into his body, is it likely to do more harm than good? That question is generally resolved by using various toxicity test methods. While the FDA can perform many of these tests itself, the basic responsibility for supplying toxicological information lies with the pharmaceutical producer. By using toxicity data and other items that may be related to human health, the FDA may approve a chemical composition for public use or deny its public use for unreasonable danger to users.
    Many chemical compositions produced by chemical companies are not intended to be used directly for the purpose of curing disease or otherwise improving the health of the public. These chemicals are generally intended for industrial/commercial use, in order to improve living conditions of the public. For example a chemical compound might be added to a plastic in order to make the plastic more easily formed into usable parts. However, industrial/commercial use chemicals accidentally find their way into the general environment and can negatively affect the health of citizens. An example might be that the previously mentioned chemical compound added to a plastic may slowly leak from the manufactured part and damage the health of citizens breathing the air contaminated with the chemical compound.
    The latter is the intended responsibility of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That is, the EPA is responsible to determine toxicity of industrial/commercial chemicals and subsequently approve or disapprove their use in manufacturing and commercial availability based upon toxicity data, concentrations in the environment, and other items related indirectly to public health. Therefore, EPA responsibility is similar to that of the FDA, with the exception that it's supposed to approve or disapprove use of chemicals not intended for use as medicines. However, similar protocols can be used. The EPA can determine its own toxicity/concentration data, but it can also require producers to supply the information for EPA's use in approving or disapproving a chemical composition's availability in industrial/commercial operations.
    With that description of basic responsibility, we have found that the EPA has expanded its role to restrict production of chemical substances which appear to have no relationship to human health. One example of this is to limit the emission of sulfur dioxide in the normal burning of coal by power plants. It had been found that sulfur dioxide further oxidizes to sulfur trioxide in the atmosphere and when mixed with atmospheric water becomes acid rain. Acid rain is not specifically dangerous to human health, but it has a negative effect on normal lower organism growth in lakes and forests. For this reason, and if one expands the role of the EPA to consider environmental art or beauty, sulfur dioxide control from power plants is logical. However, that seems to me to be a stretch of the EPA original responsibility.
    Another example of EPA control of emissions from power plants and other sources is carbon dioxide from burning carbon containing fuels. Again, there is no reason to control carbon dioxide emissions based on any negative effects to human health. However, the EPA claims control is necessary because of indirect effects on human living conditions by reason of global warming. Dissimilar to the acid rain situation, there is no data which indicates carbon dioxide emissions leading to increases of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere have any affect on global warming, with subsequent negative affects on human living conditions. In this case, we can only conclude that the EPA activity on carbon dioxide is only a matter of political significance. We can only speculate on the political significance, but we know that the Obama administration is strongly in support of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and has likely applied considerable pressure to the EPA to accommodate his position.
    These last two paragraphs are examples of EPA overreach. The sulfur dioxide situation is semi-justifiable. There seems to be no justification for carbon dioxide control. The question then arises as to what Congress should be doing in order to bring back operation of the EPA to a condition, which Congress originally had in mind when it set up this agency.
    This then gets into the general matter of law passage by Congress and the apparent traditional lack of follow-up by Congress to see that the law is working as intended, or whether it needs modification. The Toxic Substances Control Act originally set up the EPA as the operating entity. Of the various House committees, I could not find any directly related to toxic substances control or the environment in general. The closest I could get was the House Oversight. Committee, Chaired by Darrell Issa (CA).
    My search for a Senate Committee was somewhat more fruitful, but switched me over to another law, the Clean Air Act. According to Wikipedia, the Clean Air Act is designed to control air pollution on a national level. It requires the EPA to develop and enforce regulations to protect the public from airborne contaminants known to be hazardous to human health. The Senate has a committee on Environment and Public Works. It is chaired by Barbara Boxer (CA). It has a subcommittee named Clean Air, chaired by Thomas Carper (DE). It seems to me that Sen. Carper should be asking the EPA what information it has that carbon dioxide is "hazardous to human health".
    I later found that Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, has held a forum on the Clean Air Act. He probably should also be asking the EPA what information it has that carbon dioxide is "hazardous to human health".
    This brings us back to you, Rep. Neugebauer. You said that you will do everything you can to keep the EPA in line. I presume you will be in contact with Rep. Ed Whitfield and Sen. Thomas Carper to see what you can collectively do to get the EPA back on a direct course to fulfill its obligations and avoid taking on projects with political overtones that have no scientific basis.