REply: EPA PROGRAM CUTS - EMPACT

[Fred Stoss <fstoss@acsu.buffalo.edu>]

KEEP EMPACT INTACT!!!

Paul [Orum],

Why should "Congress [can] fund real-time environmental air and water quality monitoring through other means."?

The EPA's EMPACT Program works, so why not use the conventional wisdom and keep EMPACT right where it is and keep it functioning?

However, your suggestion for Congress to fund "other means" is well taken. The National Council for Science and the Environment and it preceding corporate body the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment has bee striving towards this goal for more than 10 years--to create an environmental agency that is not subject to implementation and enforcement of a regulatory framework, and to provide funding for environmental data and information management, basic environmental research, environmental education at ALL levels, and developing a National Environmental Information Infrastructure. Bills have been sent to Congress since the early 1990s for Congress to appropriate such funds.

The fact that the Bush administrations wants to cut a very useful, productive, and successful EPA program for purely, as you stated, "There was a vindictive quality in many of the early environmental steps of the new Administration," is proof enough for Congress to take serious efforts to find that "other means" you so correctly suggest.

Are their analogies in other agencies? Look at the elimination of energy conservation and alternative energy R&D; in the Department of Energy, and the elimination of funds for the USGS's National Biological information infrastructure, GAP Analysis Program, and other parts of the USGS Biological Informatics Programs. These, too, suffered because, "There was a vindictive quality in many of the early environmental steps of the new Administration."

Fred Stoss