The Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970 with the noble and simple mission of protecting the nation's air and water, should be hailed as one of the federal government's greatest success stories. 

Alas, the EPA has morphed into a job-killing enemy of economic growth, private property rights, and individual liberty. But you can join thousands of others in demanding Congress rein in this rogue agency.

Critical mass matters. Americans today enjoy the most-protected environment in the industrial world. Our air and water is vastly cleaner than when the EPA was founded, and our vehicles arenearly spotless — especially compared to the daily, dirty experience of billions who live in "developing" countries, such as China and India. 

Alas, there has never been a bureaucratic project in America that decided to congratulate itself for a job well done and call it a day — or simply acknowledge it has met its mandate and will now merely maintain its hard-earned gains for the public good. Every bureaucracy is eternally hungry, seeking out new missions outside its original mandate to justify its continued existence. It is an insidious evolution, and no department of the federal government exemplifies that better (or worse) than the EPA.

Yet now thousands of Americans in the “leave us alone” coalition are fighting back by signing a petition to urge Congress to rein in an agency that has gone completely out of control. 

The Heartland Institute — a libertarian, free-market think tank based in Chicago — is circulating a “Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency.” Morethan 5,000 people have signed the petition so far, and it will be presented to Congress in a public event on Capitol Hill when the petition gains more than 10,000 signatures.

Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, says that in the name of fighting global warming, EPA has become a “rogue agency,” spending $9 billion in 2012 alone to shackle individuals and businesses with expensive and wasteful compliance orders and mandates without the consent of Congress. 

“The toll EPA is now taking on our country is staggering, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work at a time when millions of people are unemployed and our reliance on foreign sources of energy threatens to compromise the nation’s security,” Bast said. “The solution is to rein in EPA through deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the agency.

“This can be done by Congress through its control over the government’s purse, or by a president willing to put sound science and a strong economy ahead of the demands of environmental extremists,” he said.

The EPA in recent years has imposed a huge burden on our economy, destroying jobs by blocking the use of American energy resources and giving foreign competitors an enormous cost advantage over U.S. businesses. The EPA has perverted the Clean Air Act by declaring carbon dioxide a “pollutant,” despite the plain intent of the law’s authors to exclude such naturally occurring gases, and despite major flaws in the science used to claim carbon dioxide endangers human health.

The EPA is shutting down coal-fired electricity generation across the country by enforcing air quality standards that are unnecessarily stringent and impossible to meet. This action is causing electricity rates to rise rapidly and for electrical supplies to become unreliable. 

According to Dr. Jay Lehr, science director of The Heartland Institute and a leading authority on water pollution and environmental protection, EPA’s budget could safely be cut by 80 percent or more without endangering the environment or human health. Most of what EPA does today, according to Dr. Lehr, could be done better by state government agencies, many of which didn’t exist or had much less expertise back in 1970, when EPA was created.

Congress can repeal EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide in the name of “global warming,” and it can demand cost-benefit analysis be applied to all environmental regulations. It can demand that EPA reform its politicized and unreliable scientific research program, and go back to sound science and common sense. 

The Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency calls out EPA’s unscientific and destructive campaign to frighten people over the threat of man-made global warming and demands “deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the EPA.” The American people have the power to strike a blow for sound science and common sense.

A great first step is to sign the petition, which will put pressure on Congress to stop letting EPA bureaucrats run the country we elected them to govern.