In response to the growing tangle of regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Legislative Exchange Council has published EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck: Strategies for State Legislators. The report serves as a toolkit for states to use in combating these regulations, which both burdens finite state resources and legally impedes on the states’ role in our system of government.

EPA is in the process of rapidly tightening its existing regulations and expanding its reach in areas ranging from chemicals in plastic bottles to air quality to greenhouse gas emissions, creating a mess of duplicative and cumbersome rules.  The report highlights one small subsection of this emerging regime – the Agency’s attack on the use of fossil fuels, and particularly coal, for electric generation and other commercial and manufacturing processes – to illustrate the broader issues resulting from this agenda.

State legislators have a unique role in influencing this train wreck and should reassert that the model of cooperative federalism upon which the Clean Air Act is based is superior to the Agency’s current approach.  EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck encourages states to consider resolutions calling on the U.S. Congress to: prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions; impose a moratorium on costly new air quality rules for at least two years; and require the Administration to conduct a multiagency study on the cumulative economic impacts of these regulations. Thus far in 2011, the resolution has been introduced in Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.

In the report, legislators will find discussions of more than fifteen pieces of model legislation related to regulatory reform and state environmental sovereignty. EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck also outlines the costs associated with proposed regulations that are often ignored by EPA, trumpets the real clean air and water successes over several decades, and corrects false environmentalist claims about state agency willingness to go along with the heavy-handed approach of EPA.

You can check out the full report and additional details at www.regulatorytrainwreck.com.