The EPA Snake Pit
Under
President
Obama, two women have been the director of the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), Carol Browner, who served in the Clinton administration
and was one of the "czars" Obama appointed; her acolyte Lisa Jackson,
and up for the post is
Gina McCarthy. Browner and Jackson went out of their way to conceal
their
internal communications from Congress and McCarthy lied to the committee
considering her nomination.
How bad is
the EPA? The Society of Environmental Journalists, on the occasion of the April
11 hearing on McCarthy’s nomination, released a statement that said, “The Obama
administration has been anything but transparent in its dealings with reporters
seeking information, interviews and clarification on a host of environmental,
health and public lands issues.” The SEJ accused the EPA of being “one of the
most closed, opaque agencies to the press.”
Apparently,
the primary consideration for the job of EPA Director is an intense desire to
destroy the use of hydrocarbons, oil, coal and natural gas, for transportation
and all other forms of energy on which our economy depends. Obama, when campaigning
in 2008, made it clear he wanted end the use of coal to generate electricity.
At the time, fifty percent of all electricity was produced by coal and now that
figure is in decline as coal-fired plants are being forced to close thanks to
EPA regulations.
If Ms.
McCarthy has her way, the cost of driving cars and trucks will go up in the
name of protecting the health of Americans. As Paul Driessen, a senior policy
advisor for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, recently noted, “Since
1970, America’s cars have eliminated 99% of pollutants that once came out of
tailpipes.” Joel Schwartz, co-author of “Air Quality in America”, points out,
“Today’s cars are essentially zero-emission vehicles, compared to 1970 models.”
The EPA’s latest attack on drivers is the implementation of “Tier 3 rules”
intended to reduce sulfur levels to achieve zero air quality or health
benefits.
Suffice to
say that the air and water in America is clean, very clean. Whatever health
hazards existed in the 1970s no longer exist. Like all bureaucracies, the EPA
now exists to expand its budget and its control over our lives. The Heritage
Foundation has calculated that Obama’s EPA’s twenty “major” regulations—those
that cost $100 million or more annually—could cost the U.S. more than $36
billion per year. Obama’s EPA has generated 1,920 new regulations.
Don’t
think of the EPA as a government agency. It is a weapon of economic
destruction.
This has
not gone unnoticed. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion by John Barrasso, a
Republican Senator from Wyoming, noted that “During President Obama’s first
term, EPA policies discouraged energy exploration, buried job creators under
red tape, and deliberately hid information from the public.”
“Many EPA
regulations,” said Sen. Barrasso, “chased microscopic benefits at maximum
cost,” noting for example that “The EPA has proposed dropping the acceptable
amount of ozone in the air from the 75 parts per billion allowed today to 60 or
70 parts per billion. The agency concedes that the rule would have a minimal
effect on American’s health, but says it would cost as much as $90 billion a
year. A study by the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation
estimated it would eliminate up to 7.3 million jobs in a wide variety of
industries, including refining.”
The other
sector in the EPA’s bull’s eye is agriculture. Not content with laying siege to
auto manufacturers, oil refineries, coal-fired plants, and all other energy
users that might generate carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases,
Barrasso noted that the EPA “has gathered personal information about tens of
thousands of livestock farmers and the locations of their operations” which it
then shared with environmental groups.
Writing in
The Daily Caller, Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist and
currently the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy
at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, characterized the EPA as “a miasma
populated by the most radical, disaffected and anti-industry discards from
other agencies,” adding that there was “entrenched institutional paranoia and
an oppositional world view.”
“Unscientific
policies and regulatory grandiosity and excess,” wrote Dr. Miller, “are not
EPA’s only failings; neglecting to weigh costs and benefits is shockingly
common, noting that “The EPA’s repeated failures should not come as a surprise
because the agency has long been a haven for scientifically insupportable
policies perpetrated by anti-technology ideologues.”
Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writing in
Forbes magazine, pointed out Gina McCarthy, the nominee to direct the EPA, “has
a history of misleading Congress and the public about her agency’s greenhouse
gas regulations. “At a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee in October 2011, McCarthy denied motor vehicle greenhouse gas
emission standards are “related to” fuel economy standards. In doing so,” said
Lewis, “she denied plain facts she must know to be true. She did so under
oath.”
“The EPA
has no statutory authority to regulate fuel economy. More importantly, the
federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act prohibits states from adopting laws
or regulations ‘related to’ fuel economy.”
The point
of this exercise is demonstrate that the EPA is the very definition of a “rogue
agency” for which neither laws, nor science, are of any consequence as it
pursues policies that do incalculable harm at a time when the nation is deep in
debt and in need of economic growth, not regulatory strangulation.
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
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