[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by GGG

I actually would agree with the EPA being staffed with former oil industry people.

Yeah! And the American Lung Association and American Cancer Society should be staffed by people from the tobacco and asbestos industries too! All you foxes, please mind the henhouse. Wait, what? There are no hens left? Well, that was a different level of efficiency we hoped to achieve, but at least we have no chicken poop problems to be concerned about. Amiright?

Dealing with the AER or ABSA when you get career regulators is painful. They just don't understand the purpose of what they are doing.

Or maybe you just don't understand what they are doing? A regulator's job isn't to make compliance easy, it is to insure that those being regulated comply with regulations and afford the protections mandated. The reason that academics are involved is because they have done the research to understand the negative impacts of the sphere they regulating. That does not happen in industry, and if it does and the people working in that industry fail to acknowledge that what they are doing in contributing to sickness and death, well there is a special place in hell for those people.

And industry led reform of the regulations and applications often lead to the most economical solutions that still protect the environment. So under the right leader this type of approach could be positive.

The problem is that you must trust industry to have, a) some level of morals, b) some level of social responsibility, and c) a willingness to ignore the mantra of corporate responsibility to the shareholder. Sorry, option "c" always trumps everything in modern society, especially here in the United States. You can't trust industry to self-regulate. How many stock market crashes do we need, or how many environmental disasters do we need before people learn that lesson?

However given Pruitts agenda this will unlikely be the result. Hopefully some of these corporations are concerned with public perception

NEWS FLASH: Corporations don't give a #### about what the public thinks. When it gets to the point that the public may start pushing back against them, they go out and hire a good PR company and a think tank to change the narrative. Its why the tobacco industry was able to keep the charade of health benefits of their product promoted, and the dangers buried, for decades. Its what the "conversation about climate change" is still going on. Corporations only care about one thing - profit. They want to make as much money in as short a period of time as possible, consequences be damned.