The White House has said it ordered EPA to revise the standard. Gore: Obama bows to polluters

Former Vice President Al Gore is unhappy with Barack Obama.

In a blog post Wednesday afternoon, Gore took Obama to task for his decision late last week to scrap EPA’s proposed update of George W. Bush-era smog regulations.


“Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution — even though economists have shown that the U.S. economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology,” Gore wrote.

“The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma and the continued degradation of our air quality."

Gore noted that at the same time Obama was backtracking on smog, “brave and committed activists” were getting arrested in front of the White House as part of ongoing civil disobedience protests against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline.

The White House has said it ordered the EPA to revise the 2008 smog standard due to “the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty.” Obama also said the EPA should wait to revise the rule until the next scheduled round of review is due in 2013.

Here’s Gore’s blogpost:

Confronting Disappointment On Friday afternoon, as brave and committed activists continued their non-violent civil disobedience outside the White House in protest of the tar sands pipeline that would lead to a massive increase in global warming pollution, President Obama ordered the EPA to abandon its pursuit of new curbs on emissions that worsens disease-causing smog in US cities. Earlier this year, the EPA’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that the levels of pollution now permitted — put in place by the Bush-Cheney administration— are “not legally defensible.” Those very same rules have now been embraced by the Obama White House. Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution — even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 3:02 p.m. on September 7, 2011.

This article tagged under: Al Gore

Pollution