“EPA should not be allowed to fund illegal experiments, hire surrogates to scare and propagandize us, or impose excessive, fraudulent rules that kill jobs and harm human health and welfare. Nor should it have so much fat in its budget that it can waste our money on useless, unethical programs.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s neo-Malthusian-inspired ecological battle against the economy centers upon mitigating emissions of the green greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide (CO2). But there is another part to the story: EPA’s rushed, hyper-restrictive standards for ozone.
Background
Under the Clean Air Act, EPA must set standards for ozone and other pollutants – and periodically review existing standards, to determine whether they are adequately protecting public health, or need to be tightened further.
In 1997, the agency reduced the permissible ambient ozone level to 84 parts per billion (equivalent to 8.4 cents out of $1,000,000).…
“Nothing in the Clean Air Act says EPA needs to promulgate any of these rules. But nothing says it can’t do so. It’s largely discretionary, and this Administration is determined to ‘interpret’ the science and use its executive authority to restrict and penalize hydrocarbon use – and ‘fundamentally transform’ America.”
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has already promulgated a tsunami of 1,920 regulations (Heritage Foundation: forthcoming). Many will bring few health or environmental benefits but impose high economic and unemployment costs, often to advance the Administration’s decidedly anti-hydrocarbon (aka anti-industrial-growth) agenda.
The Heritage Foundation has calculated that his EPA’s twenty “major” rulemaking decisions (costing $100 million or more annually) alone could cost the United States over $36 billion per year.
Cleaning Up Clean
The latest example involves a third layer (or tier) of rules that the agency says will clean the nation’s air and save lives, by forcing refineries to remove more sulfur and other impurities from gasoline.…
While campaigning in San Francisco in early 2008 during the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama got a little too candid. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” he opined to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Waxman-Markey: Never Forget
Elected, President Obama tried to keep his promise by way of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (aka Waxman-Markey, H.R. 2454), which narrowly passed the House in June 2009 by a vote of 219 to 212.
Among the many features in the 1,437-page bill, cap-and-trade of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions was designed to price (cap-and-tax, to critics) and thus reduce such emissions down to 17 percent of the 2005 level by 2050.…