The EPA Nation-Killing Machine

By Alan Caruba

The problem with the Environmental Protection Agency is that it has “protected” the nation into a place where corporations flee to other nations, exporting jobs no longer available here. When not doing that, it is destroying the ability of whole industries—particularly energy—and of our agricultural dynamo to function.

In late July, the Sacramento Bee reported that “There are fewer undocumented immigrants in California—and the Sacramento region—because many are now finding the American dream south of the border.” While America struggles to survive its regulatory juggernaut, “Mexico’s unemployment rate is now 4.9 percent, compared with 9.4 percent joblessness in the United States.”

What’s wrong with that equation? Everything!

Putting aside the debate over debt and wasteful spending, at the heart of the economic stagnation that has been occurring is the Environmental Protection Agency. It is an agency of pure malice and a place that arrogantly cites bogus health statistics while issuing rules and regulations that are strangling the economy.

James Hammerton of Freedom Works recently noted that “The EPA is in the process of completing and finalizing 30 major regulations and 170 major policy rules that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars of compliance costs on the economy.” Only Congress can stop this.

Long after the global warming hoax was exposed, the EPA continues to insist that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on Earth, has to be regulated. Even after the administration’s failed effort to get Cap-and-Trade legislation passed, the EPA relentlessly pursues this policy.

In brief, the claim is that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is causing global warming. Therefore it must be reduced. Who produces CO2? Everyone! Humans exhale about six pounds of it a day. Every kind of energy use for manufacturing, for transportation, for the production of electricity, all this and more generates CO2 emissions. All this and more represent the core elements of our economy.

Why would you want to “trade” CO2? Well, by selling and trading “carbon credits”, millions of dollars can be made by the exchanges set up for that purpose. Utilities and manufacturing facilities would all have to buy the credits in order to stay in business. The whole global warming hoax was devoted to this scheme and, of course, those advocating it were all going to get obscenely wealthy while the cost of everything increased for the rest of us.

The problem for the EPA is that the Chicago exchange set up to trade carbon credits has long since closed its doors after revelations in November 2009 that a handful of climate modeling scientists had rigged the models to show a warming trend when, in fact, the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998!

Sensing that its ability to destroy the economy is slipping away, the EPA has been readying regulations allegedly based on the nation’s air quality. The problem they face is that the air over the U.S. is as clean as it has ever been. With the exception of places like Los Angeles, air quality has never been better. The EPA is literally trying to regulate dust that drifts in from Africa or airborne soot that arrives from Pacific volcanoes.

Regarding its proposed Ozone rules, John Engler, the president of the Business Roundtable, noted that “There’s nothing reasonable or balanced about the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten national air-quality standards for ozone emissions at this time. For one thing, it’s premature, coming a full two years before the EPA is scheduled to complete its own scientific study of ozone emissions in 2013.” Not surprisingly, 2013 is likely to be the year that the U.S. has a new president and a Congress made up primarily of politicians devoted to debt reduction and the elimination of waste.

There is not enough time, nor space to describe how crazed the EPA is, but let me share just one example. The EPA recently told New York City that it will have to build a $1.6 billion-plus cover of a reservoir to prevent contamination of cryptosporidium, a water-born pathogen that causes diarrhea, from getting into its water system.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, “There’s one problem. The pathogen hasn’t been found in the reservoir despite years of tests and is barely present in the city.” Never mind, the EPA is claiming that the cover would “prevent between 112,000 and 365,000 cases annually”!

It gets worse, “New York City has already spent nearly $15 billion since 2002 for federally-mandated water projects, with the feds chipping in less than 1% of the costs. Next year it will finish building a $1.6 billion ultraviolet facility—the largest in the world—to disinfect water even more than it already does.”

That is just a snapshot of the billions in costs the EPA is right now trying to impose on a nation that is already $14 trillion in debt.

Here’s a suggestion. Close down the EPA entirely. Let the States determine what should be done regarding their air, water, and other environmental standards. The nation could save itself trillions by just ridding itself of the crazies running the EPA.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Is the EPA Trying to Murder the USA?

By Alan Caruba

Day after day the news arrives regarding some new announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that is often so bizarre that it seems a parody of regulation, science, and common sense.

Most people don’t have time to pay attention to the cast of characters setting the agency’s agenda but these days that includes the president’s top environment advisor, Carol Browner, a former EPA director under Bill Clinton, and Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, an acolyte of Browner and, if possible, more obsessed with destroying the nation than her former boss.

Browner is a dedicated Socialist, but Jackson is a bounce-off-the-walls enviro-wacko for whom real science is a great nuisance while pseudo-science is a blunt instrument with which to impose a regime that will destroy the economy and take down the whole nation.

At the heart of the EPA’s latest initiatives is the thoroughly debunked theory of “global warming”; that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “causing” it, and that human beings are producing too much CO2 by using various forms of energy such as coal, oil, and natural gas. All three assertions are utterly and completely false.

As you read this, the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, 0.91% argon, and 0.0389% carbon dioxide. Of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, the largest is water vapor—clouds.

When the EPA recently announced it had lifted the cap on how much ethanol had to be mixed with gasoline to increase the consumption mandates in the 2007 energy bill from 10% to 15%, it set off a firestorm of resistance. At the last count, more than 90 companies and trade associations have filed legal challenges.

The ethanol mandate was and is bogus. When mixed with gasoline, ethanol actually produces more CO2. It reduces the mileage per gallon and, in the process, damages automobile engines because it is corrosive. Made primarily from corn, it drives up the cost of countless food products. Its use is solely dependent on government mandates and subsidies. It is moonshine.

While companies and jobs depart the United States, the government flushes billions down the green toilet subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar energy.

The EPA has been asserting the right to regulate CO2, claiming that the 1970 Clean Air Act permits this. It does not.

When the State of Texas protested, The Wall Street Journal noted that Ms. Jackson was “threatening to punish Texas and other green dissenters with a de facto moratorium on any major energy or construction projects.” The Obama EPA is not run by touchy-feely tree huggers. “Put bluntly,” said the Journal, “this coercion is illegal.”

In an October 10 editorial, the Journal warned, “the EPA decision to strip permitting authority from the states is tantamount to a ban on major construction or building expansion—not merely Texan refineries, but any kind of carbon-heavy utility, industrial production, manufacturing plant or even large office buildings.”

The authority it claims would enable the EPA to shut down every kind of industrial activity or construction project nationwide.

We have witnessed the damage the Obama administration’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wrought. Despite two court rulings that it was illegal, the administration ignored them and, only when it concluded that the moratorium might cost Democrats votes in the midterm elections, was it lifted.

This is the most anti-energy administration in the nation’s history and it poses a grave threat to the economy.

CNSnews.com reported on a June 3 EPA statement, noting that “Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions will ‘slow construction nationwide for years’—but will only reduce global temperatures 0.0015 (15 ten-thousandths) of a degree Celsius in the next century.”

Mother Nature is already reducing worldwide temperatures as the result of a natural cooling cycle that began around 1998. We are more than a decade into a cycle that some meteorologists fear could become a new Little Ice Age.

A GOP minority report on the EPA’s greenhouse gas emission reduction proposals estimated than more than 800,000 jobs would be put at risk with no evidence of any environmental benefit.

In January, the EPA proposed lowering the ozone national ambient air quality standards from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to between 60 and 70 ppb. A study by the Manufacturer’s Alliance/MAPI declared that the EPA’s proposed revision of the “primary” (health based) standard would have “devastating economic impacts.”

The study estimated the new ozone standard would impose compliance costs of $1.013 trillion between 2020 and 2030 with a resulting reduction of GDP of $687 billion by 2020. They estimate 7.3 million jobs would be lost by 2020.

Ozone and carbon dioxide levels, and even levels of airborne dust are the Trojan horse the EPA is using to wreak havoc on an already fragile economy and rising levels of unemployment.

If the EPA is permitted to have its way, in ten years the economy will have been effectively destroyed. This all-encompassing federal agency gives daily evidence of trying to murder the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010