Lara Abrams Communications

On Administrator Johnson

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

Administrator Stephen Johnson seems to have decided that he’d let someone twist his arm not to do the right thing, at a terrible price.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s the following: have your own mind. Be your own man/woman. Be true to yourself and that which you value. Make the right decisions. The right decisions make sense. The wrong ones never do. You feel muddled after having made the wrong decision…not clear. Don’t let power corrupt you. Don’t bend to that which others want you to bend, when you know it’s not for you. If you are the type to bend, remember that you have to sleep with yourself at night…and every night. And most of us want peaceful slumber, I think.

This appears like one of those decisions to me that should have been easy for Johnson. It was a no-brainer, the right path was dead obvious, the facts clear. The good advice pointing in one clear direction…

Just to remind those of you who are wondering what I’m talking about:
The Environmental Protection Agency in December said it would not grant California a waiver to implement tougher tailpipe standards. California and 17 other states wanted and want these rules to help them fight global warming. California has the most aggressive strategy of any state in the nation to curb climate change. The centerpiece is a plan to reduce tailpipe emissions by nearly a third by 2016, but the state had needed the EPA’s approval to go ahead. “His (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s) state does not meet the compelling and extraordinary conditions needed to grant a waiver for motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards,” agency administrator Steven Johnson told reporters in a conference call, as per this article. The EPA had never before rejected a request from California to set tougher air pollution standards, according to the article, though another article notes that only two of the state’s 95 requests had been even partially denied.

The excuse that there should first be a national policy - please. Johnson could have used it as a precedent to create the national policy. He should have granted the waiver to allow California’s request to reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. But he didn’t.

I don’t think Johnson wanted this decision to be his legacy, but it is. I’m sure he was under great pressure, but those are the moments that count.

I reference this article and this article here, and this one here.

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