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| EPA headquarters in Washington, DC |
By Alan
Caruba
When the Republican Party takes over
majority control of Congress in January, it will face a number of battles that
must be fought with the Obama administration ranging from its amnesty intentions
to the repeal of ObamaCare, but high among the battles is the need to rein in
the metastasizing power of the Environmental Protection
Agency.
In many ways, it is the most essential
battle because it involves the provision of sufficient electrical energy to the
nation to keep its lights on. EPA “interpretations” of the Clean Air and Clean
Water Acts have become an outrageous usurpation of power that the Constitution
says belongs exclusively to the Congress.
As a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, a free market
think tank, I recall how in 2012 its president, Joe Bast, submitted 16,000
signed petitions to Congress calling on it to “rein in the EPA.” At the time he
noted that “Today’s EPA spends billions of dollars (approximately $9 billion in
2012) imposing senseless regulations. Compliance with its unnecessary rules
costs hundreds of billions of dollars more.”
Heartland’s Science Director, Dr.
Jay Lehr, said “EPA’s budget could safely be cut by 80 percent or more
without endangering the environment or human health. Most of what EPA does today
could be done better by state government agencies, many of which didn’t exist or
had much less expertise back in 1970 when EPA was
created.”
The EPA has declared virtually
everything a pollutant including the carbon dioxide (CO2) that 320 million
Americans exhale with every breath. It has pursued President Obama’s “war on
coal” for six years with a disastrous effect on coal miners, those who work for
coal-fired plants that produce electricity, and on consumers who are seeing
their energy bills soar.
As Edwin D. Hill, the president of the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, noted in August, “The EPA’s
plan, according to its own estimates, will require closing coal-fired plants
over the next five years that generate between 41 and 49 gigawatts (49,000
megawatts) of electricity” and its plan would “result in the loss of some 52,000
permanent direct jobs in utilities, mining and rail, and at least another
100,000 jobs in related industries. High skill, middle-class jobs would be lost,
falling heavily in rural communities that have few comparable employment
opportunities.”
“The United States cannot lose more
than 100 gigawatts of power in five years without severely compromising the
reliability and safety of the electrical grid,” warned Hill.
In October the Institute for Energy
Research criticized the EPA’s war on coal based on its Mercury and Air Toxics
Rule and its Cross State Air Pollution Rule, noting that 72.7 gigawatts of
electrical generating capacity have already, or are scheduled to retire. “That’s
enough to reliably power 44.7 million homes, or every home in every state west
of the Mississippi river, excluding Texas.” How widespread are the closures?
There are now 37 states with projected power plant closures, up from 30 in 2011.
The five hardest hit states are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, and
Georgia.
If a foreign nation had attacked the
U.S. in this fashion, we would be at war with
it.
The EPA is engaged in a full-scale war
on the U.S. economy as it ruthlessly forces coal-fired plants out of operation.
This form of electricity production has been around since the industry began to
serve the public in 1882 when Edison installed the world’s first generating
plants on Pearl Street in New York City’s financial district. Moreover, the U.S.
has huge reserves of coal making it an extremely affordable source of energy,
available for centuries to come.
The EPA’s actions have been criticized
by one of the nation’s leading liberal attorneys, Harvard law professor Laurence
Tribe, who has joined with Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal
company, to criticize the “executive overreach” of the EPA’s proposed rule to
regulate carbon emissions from existing power plants. He accused the agency of
abusing statutory law, violating the Constitution’s Article I, Article II, the
separations of powers, the Tenth and Fifth Amendments, and the agency’s general
contempt for the law.
It is this contempt that can be found
in virtually all of its efforts to exert power over every aspect of life in
America from the air we breathe, the water we use, property rights, all forms of
manufacturing, and, in general, everything that contributes to the economic
security and strength of the nation.
That contempt is also revealed in the
way the EPA spends its taxpayer funding. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) released a
report, “The Science of Splurging”, on December 2 in which he pointed to the
$1,100,000 spent to pay the salaries of eight employees who were not working due
to being placed on administrative leave, the $3,500,000 spent to fund “Planning
for Economic and Fiscal Health” workshops around the nation, $1,500,000 annually
to store out-of-date and unwanted publicans at an Ohio warehouse, and $700,000
to attempt to reduce methane emitted from pig flatulence in Thailand! “After years of handing out blank checks in
the form of omnibus appropriations bills and continuing resolutions,” said Sen.
Flake, “it’s time for Congress to return to regular order and restore
accountability at the EPA.”
Whether it is its alleged protection
of the air or water, the only limits that have been placed on the EPA have been
by the courts. Time and again the EPA has been admonished for over-stating or
deliberately falsifying its justification to control every aspect of life in the
nation, often in league with the Army Corps of
Engineers.
If the Republican controlled Congress
does not launch legislative action to control the EPA the consequences for
Americans will continue to mount, putting them at risk of losing electricity,
being deprived of implicit property rights, and driving up the cost of
transportation by demanding auto manufacturers increase miles-per-gallon
requirements at a time when there is now a worldwide glut of oil and the price
of gasoline is dropping.
The United States has plenty of
enemies in the world that want it to fail. It is insane that we harbor one as a
federal agency.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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