‘Job-Killing’ EPA Regulations for Chesapeake Bay Will Create 35 Times as Many Jobs as Keystone XL Pi
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/04/397397/job-killing-epa-regulations-chesapeake-bay-create-many-jobs-keystone-xl-pipeline/
If rhetoric from the Republican Presidential candidates is to be believed, the Environmental Protection Agency is “a tool to crush the private enterprise system” (Mitt Romney), “a cemetery for jobs” (Rick Perry), and “should be re-named the job-killing organization of America” (Michele Bachmann). But it’s a safe bet the tens of thousands of people who may soon find jobs implementing EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay would disagree with those assertions.
A new report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation highlights the job creation numbers expected to come from achieving new pollution goals set by the EPA’s “Total Maximum Daily Load” restrictions. Finalized in December 2010, these rules require a 25 percent reduction of pollution flowing into the Bay by 2025 and have already spurred state and federal investment in stormwater mitigation projects, upgrades at sewage treatment facilities, addition of power plant smokestack scrubbers, and improvements to management of agricultural runoff and livestock waste management.
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Meanwhile, the jobs spawned by coastal restoration and pollution reduction projects in the Chesapeake are already here, and they are permanent. According to the Foundation’s report, environmental clean-up and monitoring jobs have increased by 43 percent — 42,000 jobs — over the last two decades in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia alone. Montgomery County, MD has begun work on a stormwater pollution control project that will create 3,300 jobs in that county alone. And these numbers don’t begin to account for the increase in employment opportunities and revenue for small businesses that depend on a healthy coastal ecosystem, from tourism to commercial and recreational fishing and aquaculture.
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When they talk about the EPA, Republicans use the term “job-killing” with great frequency. As Iñigo Montoya famously said to Vizzini in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
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thumbs up for the Chesapeake Bay clean up - I spent a lot of time and enjoyment on the Bay and its inlets around Solomon's Island and so did my kids.
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