The United States has a long track record of fights against anti-pollution laws, but Rachel Maddow argued Monday night that history has proved opponents of legislation wrong.
The EPA just released new standards for power plants, which will require them to cut 30 percent of their carbon emissions by 2030. The coal industry and members of Congress have criticized the legislation, but Maddow took a look back at how similar fights against anti-pollution legislation played out.
She pointed out that the opponents of the Clean Air Act in the 1960s had warned that the law would kill the automobile industry and the economy. Critics of new regulations to curb acid rain and repair the ozone layer in the 1980s had also predicted that the legislation would cause a recession and push the country towards becoming communist.
Those predictions, Maddow said, all turned out to be wrong.
"They said the sky would fall," the MSNBC host remarked. "Quite the opposite, the ozone layer got better... we have over and over and over again made progress on these issues. We've had bipartisan votes and bipartisan support for attacking pollution as we've run into pollution problems and the science has been conclusive about how to solve those problems."
She continued, "Yes, there have been chicken littles all along the way saying it will be the end of the world if we try to stop this current round of pollution, but the chicken littles have been wrong all along."
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