In The Sacramento Bee, Wayne Madsen’s writes that President Nixon’s environmental initiatives were an “early testament to the success of green pioneers” and that he “visualized the green jobs” that would “spearhead the nation’s economy:”
Although last December’s Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change turned into a fiasco for a number of reasons, now is no time to retrench from the goals of the original Earth Day, which was observed for the first time at the 1969 UNESCO Conference on the Environment, and led to the enactment in 1970 of America’s Clean Air Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
Environmentally conscious senators, including Democrats Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Ed Muskie of Maine, saw the need for the world to address the issue of pollution and they gave their all to ensure that laws were passed to clean up the environment.
President Nixon, to his credit, also established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 – a testament to the success of the early “green pioneers.” President Obama and the Congress should, on this Earth Day, continue in the bipartisan legacy of Nixon, Nelson, and Muskie and promote the cause of green, non-carbon based energy.
On April 22 at 1:30pm, The Nixon Library will host a panel with the officials who spearheaded the goals from the original Earth Day forty years ago. The panel will be moderated by Southeastern Oklahoma State University history professor J. Borroks Flippen, and include former Nixon White House environmental executives John Whitaker and Chris DeMuth, and the first Administrator of the EPA William Ruckelshaus. Admission to the event is free and open to the public.
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