EPA Administrator Travels Halfway Around the World; Gets Nowhere

What do you do when Nancy Pelosi, environmental organizations, and 13 different states are angry with you? If you’re the head of the EPA, you hide out Down Under.

Over the Easter Break, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen Johnson took 11 staffers plus security to Australia to tour farms and water treatment plants at a total cost of $280,000 (half the budget of EPA’s annual travel allowance.) The trip was supposed to promote environmental collaboration between the U.S. and Australia, but it turns out a simple flight to California would have been a lot more productive.

Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has expressed grave frustration with Johnson for failing to testify about global warming before her committee. This would be an opportune time to explain why the EPA won’t allow California to set its own carbon cap targets. "If your goal is to learn about actions to address global warming, I suggest that you visit California, which has moved ahead aggressively with greenhouse gas controls," Boxer wrote to Johnson. Moreover, last week 18 disgruntled states and 11 environmental organizations sued the EPA for failing to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks a year after the Supreme Court ruled that they had the power to do so.

Meanwhile the Bush Administration proposes to slash the EPA’s budget by $300 million for 2009. This includes massive cuts to enforcement budgets (funds to penalize polluters), research and development of technologies that address global warming, and funding for EPA’s Superfund site cleanups (which is already half of what it was in the 1990’s.)

Yet instead of distancing himself from Bush’s policies, Johnson vacationed in Australia with U.S. Ambassador Robert McCallum, an old friend of Bush’s who represented Australia’s anti-Kyoto stance before the election of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Needless to say, the trip probably didn’t enlighten Johnson’s global warming perspective much.

To improve America’s environmental policies, Stephen Johnson would have saved a lot of money, time and - last but not least - carbon dioxide emissions if he had simply showed up at Nancy Pelosi’s office.