Texas Governor’s War On EPA Gets Time Feature On Day Of Natural Gas Explosion
It was already bad timing for Texas Governor Rick Perry to star in a Time feature on his administration’s war against environmental regulations yesterday, the 49th day since BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded. The story, which highlights his opposition to federal regulation of energy companies, coincided not just with that disaster– which is a major player in the feature itself. Adding insult to injury, the article coincided with a natural gas explosion that left one dead in the northern part of his state.
The piece, titled simply “Texas Governor Perry Declares War On the EPA,” highlights the adversarial rhetoric Perry has used to try to keep federal regulators away from Texas’ powerful oil industries, citing states’ rights issues and the health of the oil industry. Beyond that, Perry, according to the piece, fears a “federal putsch” with the EPA as it’s leading power. The anecdote he used to prove this, according to the story: “Earlier this month, he said, the EPA pushed aside the state’s prerogatives and said that the federal agency will now determine if a Corpus Christi refinery, the fifth largest in the state, is meeting air quality standards. ”
The “federal putsch” stance has become mostly expected for a Texas Republican, but it seems at least a bit incongruous with reality now, when the state’s coastline is threatened by a mistake the very industry Perry seeks to protect has made. When even John Stossel is calling for federal regulation, it may be time to reconsider the stance. And it’s not just that Perry is refusing to give the oil spill its due or revisit his opinions, writes author Hilary Hylton, it’s that he is defiantly standing up for the oil companies even now:
“As the oil industry grappled with a public relations nightmare in the Gulf, Perry traveled last week to Deer Park, Texas, a major center of the state’s petrochemical industry. Standing with industry leaders and petrochemical workers, Perry blasted the Obama Administration for pushing a ‘command and control approach’ that would ‘destroy Texas’s successful clean air program and threaten tens of thousands of good Texas jobs in the process.’”
The jobs concern, as we have seen in the many cable news broadcasts from the Gulf this month, is not limited to Texas, though it isn’t quite considered as black-or-white of a issue as Perry seems to portray it. But, about that “successful clean air program” bit… how about that massive natural gas explosion that coincided perfectly with the release of this feature?
That’s not to say these disasters are commonplace, nor do the failures of the natural gas companies have much to do with those of the oil companies, but it doesn’t help the argument for lack of regulation to have the state’s biggest fossil fuel industries parading massive failures all over cable news as the governor makes his most public defense of them. And news is breaking now that there was a second gas explosion today, also in northern Texas, suggesting that there is a major safety issue up there that the state did not do a good enough job of addressing. Perry already had more than enough information before him– in the form of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil threatening to wash ashore on his state– to merit a reconsideration of his position, at least temporarily while Americans figure out how to deal with the tragedy before them. Now he has a Texan dead in what may be the result of more corporate negligence.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
