“EPA’s power grab picks the pockets of every American business and
citizen, making it increasingly expensive to fill gas tanks, heat and
cool homes and offices, run hospitals and factories, or buy food and
consumer goods,”
says this article by Paul Driessen.
“My article this week addresses the serious and growing problem of
junk science, disinformation and outright fraud by the US Environmental
Protection Agency, as it seeks to advance its and President Obama’s
anti-hydrocarbon agenda, at the expense of jobs, economic growth and,
indeed, the overall health and welfare of American citizens,” says
Driessen. “These are serious charges, but this article backs them up
with examples and links to more than 20 articles and reports that
further buttress its points.”
Government of, by and for the EPA
EPA advances anti-energy agenda, with little regard for Americans’ health or welfare
By Paul Driessen
Seven score and nine years ago, President Lincoln resolved to take
increased devotion to ensuring that government of the people, by the
people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.
Yet, today, our lives are determined not so much by We the People, as
by a distant central government, particularly increasingly powerful,
unelected and unaccountable Executive Branch agencies. Foremost among
them, by almost any standard, is the Environmental Protection Agency.
Under Administrator Lisa Jackson, the Gettysburg vision has mutated
into government of, by and for the EPA. Indeed, Ms. Jackson seeks not
merely to regulate, but to legislate; not merely to protect our health
and environment against every conceivable risk, but to control every
facet of our economy, livelihoods and lives. Under her direction, EPA
increasingly flaunts the naked power of regulators gone wild.
Instead of following laws and policies set by our elected
representatives, EPA is now controlled by environmental ideologues,
determined to impose their utopian ideas, via a massive and arrogant
power grab. President Obama set the tone, with his promises to
“bankrupt” coal and utility companies and “radically transform” our
economy and society, and serves as the rogue agency’s
cheerleader-in-chief. With few exceptions, our courts have refused to
intervene, and the Senate has obstructed any meaningful efforts to
constrain agency overreach or reexamine the laws under which it claims
jurisdiction.
EPA’s power grab picks the pockets of every American business and
citizen, making it increasingly expensive to fill gas tanks, heat and
cool homes and offices, run hospitals and factories, or buy food and
consumer goods. The Employment Prevention Agency’s $100-billion diktats
are killing countless jobs, making America more dependent on foreign
sources of energy and raw materials that we have in abundance right here
at home, and endangering our economic health and national security.
Under Lisa Jackson’s agenda, fossil fuels are to be relegated to the
dustbin of history. America is to get its energy from intermittent,
unreliable, “renewable” sources, whenever they are available.
Regulations on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” mercury,
soot and other substances are to make non-hydrocarbon energy appear
cheaper by comparison, and pave the way for
crony-corporatist “alternatives” like
wind,
solar,
ethanol, wave and tidal action, and even
biofuel for the Navy and Air Force.
In a mere six instances, our courts have delayed or blocked some of
EPA’s worst excesses. Ruling that the agency had exceeded its authority,
the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
struck down
EPA’s “cross-state” air pollution rule, which would have controlled
power plant emissions on the ground that computer models predicted the
pollutants might harm neighborhoods hundreds of miles away.
In far too many other cases, however, EPA has been given
carte blanche
to regulate as it sees fit. A key pretext is the 1970 Clean Air Act, as
amended by Congress in 1977 and 1990. The act deals primarily with six
common pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, particulates (soot),
ozone, lead and carbon monoxide. It never mentions carbon dioxide, the
plant-fertilizing gas that is essential for all life.
As EPA itself acknowledges, between 1970 and 2010, those six
“criteria” air pollutants declined by an average of 63% and will
continue to do so under existing regulations and technologies. Moreover,
those dramatic
reductions occurred even as
coal-based electricity generation increased 180% … overall US energy
consumption rose 40% … miles traveled soared 168% … and the nation’s
population increased by 110 million. However, EPA intends to go much
further, to advance its radical agenda.
It ruled that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant,” ignoring
solar influences and citing claims by alarmists like James Hansen and the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change that this essential gas (0.0395% of Earth’s
atmosphere) “contributes” to “dangerous” global warming.
Since
hydrocarbons provide 85% of the energy used to power America, this
single ruling gives EPA effective control over our transportation,
manufacturing, heating, cooling and other activities – virtually our
entire economy – while making it all but impossible to operate existing
coal-fired power plants or build new ones.
To ensure that coal really is excised from our energy mix, EPA also issued oppressive new rules on other emissions. Its
new mercury rule is based on computer-generated risks to
hypothetical American women
who eat 296 pounds of fish a year that they catch themselves, its
determination to prevent a theoretical reduction in IQ test scores by
“0.00209 points,” and its refusal to recognize that coal-fired
power plants contribute just 3% of the total mercury deposited in American watersheds, and thus in fish tissue.
EPA’s new
PM2.5 soot standard is equivalent to having
one ounce
of super-fine dust spread equally in a volume of air one-half mile
long, one-half mile wide and one story tall – while other rules demand
that water from coal mines be cleaner than Perrier bottled water!
The agency repeatedly denied Shell Oil permits to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, because emissions from
drilling rig and
icebreaker engines might contribute to global warming. It opposes the
Keystone XL
Pipeline on the ground that burning Canadian oil sands fuel might
likewise “contribute” to catastrophic climate change – whereas that
would presumably not be the case if China burned that same fuel.
When Congress failed to act, it imposed new 54.5 mpg automobile
standards that will make cars less affordable, but also smaller, more
lightweight and less safe, causing thousands of additional injuries,
disabilities and deaths every year. The agency bragged about fuel savings, and ignored the human toll.
EPA also
added industrial pollution,
habitat destruction and fertilizer runoff as more reasons why
irrigation water should not be turned on again in California’s San
Joaquin Valley, to “protect” the delta smelt at the expense of farm jobs
and families, after a
judge ordered water to be turned back on.
To further justify its despotic decisions, EPA
grossly overstates
the economic benefits of its rules – insisting that each “premature
death” theoretically avoided creates $9 million in hypothetical societal
economic gains, whether the assumed “person” was a newborn or an
85-year-old in hospice care.
If even that isn’t enough, it uses
human subjects
in laboratory tests, exposing them to what Ms. Jackson has testified
are dangerous, even toxic levels of fine soot. The agency also
pays activist groups millions of taxpayer dollars a year to promote and applaud its farfetched claims and rogue actions.
Finally, EPA ignores the clearly harmful impacts its regulations have on human health and welfare. The rules cost jobs, thereby
increasing the risk
of depression, alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse, cardiovascular
disease and suicide. They just as obviously raise the cost of food,
electricity, heating, air conditioning, commuting, healthcare and other
necessities, thereby reducing health, welfare, living standards, civil
rights progress and environmental justice – especially for poor, elderly
and minority families.
EPA is out of control, and thus far unaccountable for its abuses of
power, its disinformation and fraud, and the harm it is inflicting – for
little or no health or environmental benefit.
Our founding fathers provided for elections, so that the American
people could choose leaders who make the major decisions affecting their
lives – and not be subjected to involuntary servitude at the hands of
unelected, unaccountable kings or bureaucrats.
Rarely in history has one election meant so much, or one agency
asserted so much control over our lives, livelihoods and freedoms. The
2012 elections will determine whether America once again enjoys a new
birth of freedom, or continues suffering under an EPA that enslaves and
impoverishes us, rather than protects us.
In the World Economic Forum’s annual 
