I spent time in southern California and for the most part the air was relatively clear. In the summer of 73 I went back to Riverside for a visit and I couldn't believe the difference. You could slice the air with a knife it was so thick, couldn't see a city block away. I'm sure that isn't the case anymore so yes environmental laws do make a difference.

China produces over twice as much iron ore as the USA, and almost nine times as much steel. You can blame this on a number of factors: increased recycling; the rise in efficiency of US industry; the increase in longevity of consumer goods requiring steel, like cars and refrigerators and washing machines; the decline in major construction requiring steel beams and rebar, etc. And the decline of the industry is in part due as much to increased automation as it is to the relative decline in production; what took 17000 workers in any major manufacturing industry, over 40 years ago, now requires a fraction of that number.

modernize in part because of the high cost to comply with EPA regulations. So our jobs are now in China, it takes energy to make steel in China also. China has no EPA
and slave labor, we shouldn't even be trading with them in the first place. Now with stiffer regulations on the electric producers, we will do the same send more jobs to China. You think China gives a fuck about CO2? People in the big cities want all the energy than can waste but we have to suffer the results here in the rust belt.

To prop up an otherwise declining industry that domestic resources are insufficient for? It's certainly more sensible for finished steel to be produced close to where the iron ore is mined in terms of efficiency. Funny how people who complain about "stealing jobs from American workers" have no problem with stealing jobs from, say, Chinese or Indian workers.

comes from recycled scrap not iron ore. Well since China doesn't produce enough coal to meet their demand isn't it more sensible to use the coal where it is mined in the USA where we have environmental and labor standards? Those jobs shouldn't be in communist China in the first place. Funny how we trade with communist China but still boycott Cuba after over 50 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production

I hate this revisionism. He just did it for political positioning. You can thank Senator Muskie for the act

... our last liberal president.

I did. He was an anti-Semite, racist, and war-monger
You think our government actions against Occupy were bad... Nixon had an all-out war on anti-war protesters.

I'll give you a quote and a link:
Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/woodward-and-bernstein-nixon-s-crimes-were-worse-than-we/article_c9664e56-b3f8-11e1-bc67-0019bb2963f4.html#ixzz33U9TWaEP

In fact read the whole article. It will help disabuse anyone who buys into Nixon revisionism.

... by an expert on National Public Radio.

In my expert opinion, he was no liberal. He was a hateful, scheming, racist ( have you heard the tapes!) asshole.

What kind of president was Richard M. Nixon? On the domestic front, a startlingly indifferent one. He once famously labeled domestic policy "building outhouses in Peoria"; he believed such matters took care of themselves, without a president to guide them, and nearly set out to prove it. Later, the laws passed during his administration, and the bills he attempted to pass, earned Nixon a reputation as a sort of liberal. It would be more accurate to say that he took the path of least resistance, and that the conventional policy wisdom of the day was, simply, liberal. He paid closest attention to domestic policy-making when it involved a political constituency he wanted to punish or reward.

He was sold, for example, on adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan's idea for a guaranteed minimum income to replace the existing welfare system when Moynihan assured him it would wipe out the social welfare bureaucracy, a Democratic political constituency. (In a strategy meeting for the 1972 election, he proposed either sabotaging its passage or implementation, either way preserving credit for caring about the poor without doing anything at all.) His federal drug control policies could never have survived in our own conservative era: for heroin addicts, they substituted medical treatment for punishment. Nixon's interest in reform was once again political: he hoped fewer heroin addicts would add up to a lower crime rates in time for his 1972 reelection campaign.

His policy preferences also indicated a conflicted eagerness to please opinion-making elites. They praised his establishment of an Environmental Protection Agency, launched with an inspiring speech: "the 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debts to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its water, and our living environment. It is literally now or never." But he shared his true opinion of the issue in an Oval Office meeting auto executives: that environmentalists wanted to "go back and live like a bunch of damned animals." Throwing conservationists a bone also suited another political purpose: the issue was popular among the same young people who were enraged at him for continuing the Vietnam War. In the end, the EPA was a sort of confidence game. The new agency represented not a single new penny in federal spending for the environment. It did, however, newly concentrate bureaucracies previously scattered through vast federal bureaucracy under a single administrator loyal to the White House--the better to control them.

EDIT

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/07/rick-perlstein.html

It passed the Senate 73-0, and the House 375-1.

Of course Nixon had his bad points, but he did support environmental measures. For example, here is his special message to Congress about "Reorganization Plans to Establish the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration":

http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/reorganization-plan-no-3-1970

Rupublicans just bowed to pressure because things got so bad

House, 375 - 1.

If Nixon vetoed, Congress would have just overridden the veto, and the Clean Air Act, also known as the "Muskie Act", named after the awesome Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie largely responsible for crafting and promoting the bill.

In 1972, Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act, which he actually somewhat supported supported, because Congress had boosted the cost of the Bill. Congress overrode the veto, and then Nixon proceeded to jack $9 billion from the bill...about half the money approved by Congress.