Pollution & the Tea Party

I know the headline is a bit broad as the Tea Party does not really rant about Pollution, but they seem to want to disband the EPA.

I have been working in New Jersey and riding the train through the Meadowland marshes to get here.  I love blue crabs and I wondered if they were thriving in the waters of the Meadowlands.  So I googled it.

The crabs are thriving but they are poisonous to eat.  They have dioxin and mercury in them.  The waters of the Meadowlands, which are tidal, are incredibly unhealthy for humans.  They are this way because industry dumped bad stuff into the waters running through Newark and other industrial cities located along these waters.

Why did they do this?  Because they didn't want to incur the cost of doing something safe (and perhaps did not understand how bad the stuff was at the time).  Preventing pollution costs money while causing pollution costs nothing. The polluter has a cost advantage over the good citizen who is responsible to their community.  So the polluter gets more business and pollutes more, while the non-polluter gets less business and either starts polluting or goes out of business.  The community ends up with inedible natural resources that we need to feed people.

Fortunately, the EPA and the Clean Water Act have been around for since 1972, so Richard Nixon must have signed the bill.  The U.S. is a relatively clean place now, but only because the EPA exists and works to find polluters.  Dismantling the EPA or defunding them, as the House GOP has proposed, is not good for society as the record of history shows.

I don't understand the Tea Party.  Why would you defund the EPA?  Don't they like clean air and water?  Do the understand how environmental economics works?  I don't think so and that is why their power in politics today is so frightening to me.