President Obama is not perfect, and despite claims to the contrary, few on the left are devoted Obama cultists. Certainly liberals have been more than happy to criticize Obama when we believe he’s made (or is making) mistakes, such as, for example, our criticism of the policies pursued by his economic team of Geithner and Summers, or the continued use and defense of the “State Secrets” privilege begun under the Bush and Cheney regime. I’m sure you can think of other examples in which Obama has come up short in your eyes.

That said, its important to remind ourselves once in a while of the reasons why we did vote for this flawed individual as our President. Here’s one of them:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government will once again require companies to fully disclose the toxic chemicals they release into the air, onto land and into water.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it was reversing a decision by the Bush administration in 2006 that reduced reporting of toxic pollution for more than 3,500 facilities nationwide. […]

“People have a right to the information that might affect their health and the health of their children – and EPA has a responsibility to provide it,” [EPA adminstrator Lisa] Jackson said in a statement.

Some might consider this a small achievement, but it’s not. It’s an essential restoration of a necessary government service. Information about toxic releases is critical to the effective federal and state regulation of business and industry for the protection and safety of the public. And for any conservative or libertarian who suggests that government regulation is an unnecessary burden on private enterprise, or that the free market will self-regulate those businesses which pollute, let me be frank. How much risk are willing to accept regarding the health and well being of yourself or your family? Because less governmental regulation has clearly shown itself to be an utter failure as a policy:

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water , according to an Associated Press investigation. […]

The data don’t show exactly how much of the 271 million pounds comes from drugmakers versus other manufacturers. To date, drugmakers have dismissed the suggestion that their manufacturing contributes significantly to what’s being found in water. Federal drug and water regulators agree.

But some researchers say the lack of required testing amounts to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about whether drugmakers are contributing to water pollution.

“It doesn’t pass the straight-face test to say pharmaceutical manufacturers are not emitting any of the compounds they’re creating,” said Kyla Bennett, who spent 10 years with the EPA before becoming an environmental lawyer.

I think Ms. Bennett meant the “smell test” but regardless, she’s correct. Less regulation has meant less oversight of business practices which place the health and safety of men, women and children in jeopardy. And hundreds of millions of pounds of drug compounds released into our water supply each year is just one cause for concern. There’s also the issue of other pollutants contaminating our water and food supply:

The Clean Water Act called for all the nation’s waters to be fishable and swimmable by 1983. It lead to crackdowns on factories, sewage plants and other industrial polluters, and many if not most have cleaned up. But as the documentary makes clear, the legacy of that pollution lives on in the sediments on the bottom of Puget Sound and other water ways. PCBs and other long-lasting chemicals make their way into the aquatic food chain, contaminating the fish we eat […]

. . . EPA lately has taken a tougher line on requiring chicken farms to get pollution discharge permits, prompting hundreds of growers on the Shore to reluctantly bow to regulation. Smith mentions that development in passing – it probably happened too late in the documentary’s final editing to devote much more to it, and to be fair, it’s not clear yet if it will really change anything.

Farm runoff notwithstanding, though much of the most visible pollution has been cleaned up, there are new and largely invisible threats. Smith follows government fisheries biologists as they study fish kills and mutations in the Virginia headwaters of the Potomac River. Those are problems that experts believe may be linked to the soup of hormones and chemicals getting into the water from consumer products like medicines, soaps, toothpaste and household cleaners.

Eight years of Republican control of EPA and FDA and other Federal regulatory agencies has without doubt caused tremendous harm to our environment, and ultimately to our own health and well being. We may never be able to quantify the number of people who will suffer actusal physical harm, nor the number of deaths which have and will result from the Bushies’ policy of benign neglect and reduced oversight of industry, but at least with Obama we now have a President who will not ignore, much less actively degrade, the government’s regulatory mandate under the law. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s not.

Without government to step in and provide leadership and a framework for addressing our many environmental concerns, including the issue of carbon emissions and global warming, the fight for the future, our future and our children and grandchildren’s future, will be lost. Corporations judge their success every three months based on the value of their stock price, their revenues and their profits. That is the wrong timescale and the wrong metric in which to address environmental concerns. As long as a Republican remained in the Oval Office, however, that was the only metric that counted.

Whatever else he may or may not do, at least President Obama has reversed the misguided priorities of those who consider the financial health of multinational corporations as the only relevant factor in making decisions regarding environmental issues.