Barack Obama swept into the Presidency promising a new political order, one characterized by “transparency” and “openness.” Three years later, the President’s lofty campaign promises are belied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s record of suppression.

Federal agencies cannot issue regulations willy-nilly; rather, they are bound to rules stipulating administrative procedure, in order to ensure the voice of affected parties is heard. Obama’s EPA, however, evinces a troubling tendency to circumvent these procedural rules. Regulated entities are being subjected to controversial, onerous regimes, before they even have the opportunity to read the rules, much less voice an objection. The wayward Agency is exercising an unanswerable power, straight out of a Kafka novella.

Consider, for example, EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) as it pertains to Texas.  In the August 2010 proposed CSAPR, the Lone Star State was found to be in compliance with the regulation’s particulate matter emissions limits. Without notice, in the July 2011 final CSAPR, EPA imposed on Texas the harshest particulate matter emissions limits of any State. The technology required by EPA’s final CSAPR requires three years to install, but EPA gave the State only 6 months to do so. Recently, the non-partisan operator of Texas’s power grid warned that the CSAPR could lead to blackouts.

Texas was left out of EPA’s deliberations for the CSAPR, but the State will have a voice before the judicial system. In late December, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. stayed implementation of the CSAPR, which was supposed to take effect on January 1, until the court decides on the merits of Texas’s allegations that EPA violated federal laws regarding proper administrative procedure.

The previous example is as blunt a violation of due process as one could imagine. Elsewhere, like in Appalachia, EPA has proven subtler. Mountaintop mining is sanctioned by the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, and it essential for the competitiveness of Appalachia’s coal industry. Yet it is loathed by environmentalists, which is why EPA has had this industry in its cross-hairs since President Obama took office.

To that end, EPA alleges that West Virginia and Kentucky’s existing water quality standards are unacceptable because they insufficiently protect an insect (the mayfly) from surface coal mining operations. However, EPA already has approved these states’ Clean Water Act permitting regimes, and this complicates matters for the Agency. For environmental federalism conflicts such as this, the Clean Water Act stipulates a resolution process, one that allows states significant participation. EPA, however, didn’t want to delay its crackdown on mountaintop mining removal. Therefore, in April 2010, EPA issued new water quality standards that were officially “non-binding,” but which EPA nonetheless informed States to follow when it issues Clean Water Act permits. And if they do not, EPA has demonstrated that it will veto permits thus granted. The result is that West Virginia and Kentucky are beholden to a regulatory regime characterized by what Rep. Nick Rahall (D-West Virginia) describes as “do or dare permits”: Appalachian States must follow EPA’s “non-binding” guidance, or risk EPA’s veto.

While West Virginia and Kentucky have been shut out of EPA’s deliberations on new water quality standards, they will have their day in court. These States sued EPA, and this spring a federal district court in Washington, D.C. will decide on the merits of their allegations that EPA violated administrative procedure laws in its rush to halt mountaintop mining removal.

EPA is being similarly sneaky in its dealings with New Mexico on a visibility protection policy pursuant to the Clean Air Act. Instead of relying on “non-binding” guidance documents in order to suppress input, EPA is claiming that it has no choice but to ignore New Mexico, due to deadlines established by environmentalist special interest lawyers.

Here’s the background: Under the Regional Haze provision of the Clean Air Act, States are required to improve the view at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. On June 2, the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board unanimously approved a Regional Haze plan that would meet the federal law and EPA’s own rules, at a cost of $34 million.

EPA, however, refused to even consider New Mexico’s visibility strategy. On August 5, the Agency imposed a Regional Haze plan that would cost New Mexico ratepayers $370 million–a nearly tenfold increase over those approved by New Mexico officials. EPA claimed that it did not have the time to consider the state’s plan, because it had to act before an August 22 deadline established by a consent decree with WildEarth Guardians, and environmental litigation organization. At best, EPA’s claim that it had no discretion is malarkey—it has plenty of legal latitude, and EPA’s claim to the contrary is absurd. At worst, this is an incidence of wink*wink* consent decrees, whereby EPA and environmentalist litigation outfits enact policy in the court-house, instead of having to deal with the rigors of proper administrative procedure.

In either case, the result was the same: EPA refused to consider New Mexico’s plan. The state may have been shut out by EPA, but it will be heard by a group of judges. New Mexico has a pending case against EPA in the 10^th federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado.

For rule-of-law proponents like me, the silver lining is EPA likely will get spanked in the courts. Even so, the country loses, because the President’s campaign talk about transparency and openness has been exposed as mumbo-jumbo.

In a recent blog, I explained how the Environmental Protection Agency is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. EPA is using these “Franken-regs” to trump the states’ rightful authority on visibility improvement policy and impose billions of dollars of emissions controls for benefits that are literally invisible.

Yesterday, for example, EPA relied on this hybrid authority to impose a federal regulatory plan on Oklahoma over the Sooner State’s objection. (A copy of the federal register notice is available here). In February, Oklahoma submitted a visibility improvement plan that would require fuel switching from coal to natural gas at six power plants by 2022, but EPA rejected this approach in March. In its stead, EPA proposed a federal plan that would require almost $2 billion in emissions controls, in addition to fuel switching. EPA’s proposed plan was finalized yesterday.

Although the Clean Air Act clearly gives states primacy over EPA in decision-making for visibility improvement, Oklahoma is one of three states subject to a federal plan. In August, EPA imposed a plan on New Mexico that costs $740 million more than the state’s plan. In September, EPA proposed a federal plan for North Dakota. All three states are challenging EPA in federal court.

On October 17, EPA proposed to disapprove Arkansas’s visibility improvement plan, using the same dubious legal logic that the Agency employed to run roughshod over New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Earlier this week, I submitted comments to the EPA on its proposal. They are available here. They detail the regulatory inconsistencies of EPA’s regulatory regime for visibility improvement. In a nutshell, EPA is evaluating state plans by different criteria, without explaining why it is doing so. Under administrative procedure law, EPA must respond to each unique comment. I look forward to reading the tortuous reasoning the Agency will use to justify its actions.

Recently, an environmentalist special interest group engendered a political backlash in Massachusetts after running a particularly sleazy television advertisement that equated baby abuse with Sen. Scott Brown’s (R) admirable vote for excellent legislation that would have reined in the Environmental Protection Agency’s runaway regulatory regime for greenhouse gas emissions. I wrote about it here; suffice it to say, Sen. Brown turned lemons into lemonade by painting himself as a sympathetic father-figure under attack from unscrupulous sleazebags.

In the immediate wake of this blowback, I find it interesting that Politico’s Morning Energy Report (I recommend signing up here) reported today on how the greens feel that they have failed to achieve a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme because they have been too timid. According to the Politico writeup,

After spending a half-billion dollars on failed campaigns for a U.S. climate bill and an international climate treaty, green groups’ major bankrollers are wondering if they need to be more selective with their carrots and more menacing with their sticks.

“We’re not very good at supporting our friends and we’re not particularly good at punishing people who vote the wrong way,’ Kathleen Welch, a Washington-based philanthropy adviser, said. ‘Unless we’re really willing to play hardball, I don’t think we can win on big issues like this.’

…Now, the donors are exploring new strategies to make their dollars do more, including attacking greenhouse gases one economic sector at a time, targeting political moderates and concentrating their efforts in swing states.

This storyline makes a great deal of sense…in bizarro world. On planet earth, the greens have been playing “hardball” for some time now. Those distasteful ads I described above weren’t run solely in Massachusetts. No, they were also run in Missouri, to punish Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, for having the temerity to try to save the economy from the EPA.

This wasn’t the first time that environmentalist special interest groups have gone after Democrats for failing to toe the green line. As my colleague Marlo Lewis explained in this blog post, last year Move On leveled the ‘baby-harmer’ charge at Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas).

All three of these Democratic Senators are mothers. How much more “hardball” can the environmentalist movement get, than attacking politically-like minded women politicians with the accusation that they are harming babies? The gutter gets no deeper.

My guess is that this “hardball” nonsense is a sleight of hand, crafted by a well-heeled public relations group, in order to draw attention away from the political blowback in Massachusetts. That is, it’s political propaganda.

After a five-month review, the Obama Administration announced this week that it had gotten rid of, was going to get rid of, or was considering getting rid of several dozen unnecessary regulations. The total savings could add up to several billions of dollars a year.

As part of the rollout, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was reviewing 31 regulations for elimination.  EPA also announced that it had suspended the new rules regulating milk spills under the Clean Water Act.  That will save dairy farmers an estimated $146 million a year.  Ending another regulation will save gas station owners $67 million a year.

This exercise indicates the level of contempt that President Barack Obama and his Administration have for the American people.  They think that we are so stupid that they can fool us with some piddling trimming while they push full speed ahead with their regulatory onslaught.  As Wayne Crews of CEI shows in Ten Thousand Commandments: an Annual Snapshot of the Regulatory State, the Obama Administration has over 4000 new regulations in the pipeline.  The EPA is trying to raise energy prices for all Americans and destroy jobs by regulating greenhouse gas emissions.  And EPA is also targeting specific industries, such as coal, with job-killing regulations.

What the Obama Administration is doing is like the thug who, while breaking your arms, kindly offers to take care of the hang nail that he spots.

Today, the U.S. EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proudly unveil their new, improved, long-awaited, supah-dupah, “next generation” fuel economy sticker. All model year 2013 vehicles will have to display the redesigned stickers.

“The new labels, which are the most dramatic overhaul to fuel economy labels since the program began more than 30 years ago, will provide more comprehensive fuel efficiency information, including estimated annual fuel costs, savings, as well as information on each vehicle’s environmental impact,” EPA’s press releaseenthuses. Only in the makework world of bureaucracy central would this “overhaul” of a label be hailed as “dramatic.”

As my colleague William Yeatman joked when I told him the news: “Anyone can have a sticker, but a next generation sticker – the future is here, my friend!”

In their original August 2010 regulatory proposal, the agencies wanted the new label to include letter grades based on the car’s fuel economy and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids would get an A+; the biggest, heaviest, gas guzzling SUVs would get a D.

However, in December 2010, 53 House Members sent a bipartisan letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and DOT Secretary Ray LaHood protesting that letter grades would “unfairly promote certain vehicles over others.” Indeed, that was the point. Stigmatize SUVs and other politically-incorrect vehicles by giving them bad grades.

Worse, grading cars implicitly means grading the people who buy them. People who buy cars with super-low or zero emissions are caring and ahead of the curve. Those who buy gas guzzlers are yokels who voted for Bush and wear baseball caps in restaurants. The South Park spoof on the “Toyonda Pius,” Smug Alert, all-too-accurately depicts the greener-than-thou pretension of EPA and NHTSA’s proposed grading system.

Rebuked by those wielding the power of the purse, the agencies relented and the “next generation” sticker does not include letter grades. To view the current sticker, click here. To see what the scolds at EPA and NHTSA originally planned to replace it with, click here.

Clearly, these folks are into behavior modification. How potent will the redesigned label be in modifying your behavior?

Among other rationales for proposing to grade cars based on their fuel economy, the agencies claimed that adding letter grades would help consumers make smarter purchases by combating something called the “MPG Illusion.”

The MPG Illusion refers to the common mis-perception that fuel savings from mpg increases are linear. People often assume that each additional 1 mile per gallon increase in a vehicle’s fuel economy reduces fuel consumption and gasoline expenditures by the same amount. Hence, some may conclude, if they can’t afford (or simply don’t want) a Toyota Prius, Chevy Volt, or some other high-mpg vehicle, there’s no point in buying a car with only modestly better fuel economy than their current vehicle. In reality, fuel consumption avoided and dollars saved decrease as mpg increases. Which is to say, the biggest fuel savings come from modest fuel-economy improvements in the lowest mpg vehicles. Some hypothetical (indeed fanciful) examples will make this crystal clear.

Suppose that your current car gets only 1 mile per gallon, you drive 100 miles per week, and gasoline costs $3.00 per gallon. This means you consume 100 gallons and spend $300.00 per week. If you replace that car with a 2 mpg vehicle, you’ll consume 50 gallons and save $150.00 per week. At the very bottom end of the scale, even a 1 mpg increase in fuel economy yields big savings.

Suppose now that your current car gets 99 mpg, you drive 100 miles per week, and gas costs $3.00. This means you consume 1.01 gallons and spend $3.03 per week. If you replace that car with a 100 mpg vehicle, you’ll consume 1 gallon and save 3 cents per week. At the very top of the fuel economy scale, the fuel and cost savings from an extra 1 mpg are negligible.

Professors Rick Larrick and Jack Soll of Princeton University put the MPG Illusion on the map when they published an article about it in Science magazine. They explain the basic arithmetic in this Youtube video. Their illustrative case assumes a motorist who drives 100 miles per week. If the motorist has a 10 mpg vehicle and switches to a 20 mpg vehicle, he’ll cut his weekly fuel consumption from 10 gallons to 5 gallons — a savings of 5 gallons. If the motorist has a 25 mpg vehicle and switches to a 50 mpg  vehicle, he’ll cut his weekly fuel consumption from 4 gallons to 2 gallons — a savings of only 2 gallons. “The key insight,” says Larrick, “is that improving inefficient cars that have low mpgs, by even low mpg increases, saves a lot of gas.”

To counter the MPG Illusion, Larrick and Soll advise policymakers to express fuel economy in terms of the amount of fuel consumed per unit of distance traveled. Expressing fuel economy in the conventional way, as miles per gallon, leads people to “undervalue small improvements on inefficient vehicles” and “underestimate the value of removing the most fuel inefficient vehicles,” the researchers argue in Science. One could also say — they don’t — that mpg ratings lead people to overestimate the value of purchasing a hybrid.

In any event, Larrick and Soll’s paper was music to the ears of the anti-SUV crowd. Greenies would love to believe that the market for SUVs is sustained by an “illusion.” Because if that is so, then EPA and NHTSA can depress SUV sales just by making simple changes in how fuel-economy information is presented — just by redesigning the sticker!

Consistent with Larrick and Soll’s advice, the ”next generation” sticker includes an estimate of how many gallons it takes to drive 100 miles.

Years of SUV-bashing, fuel-economy proselytizing, climate-change scaremongering, and high gasoline prices have failed to kill SUV sales. Could that have something to do with the attributes of the vehicles — their size, safety, and utility? Are there no physical differences between SUVs and cars greenies insist are “smart?” Or is it simply, or mainly, a faulty optic that sustains a market for SUVs?

If the MPG Illusion has anything to do with SUV sales, then you gotta ask: Who’s responsible for foisting the illusion on the public? Answer: the very people who’ve tried to brow beat us into believing that the only vehicle attribute worth considering is its mpg — the preachers and proselytizers of fuel economy! There’s no escaping the law of unintended consequences.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board last week penned a widely circulated thesis that “[t]he environment and public health will be thrown under a bus for the sake of his [President Barack Obama’s] reelection in 2012.” While I would love, love, love for this to be true, it isn’t; the L.A. Times editorial board’s contention that the president has abandoned greens to score political points is bunk.

In fact, this administration is waging a war on conventional energy supply and demand in this country, with very real repercussions for everyday Americans. Just ask the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, oil and gas drillers along the Gulf, or coal miners in Appalachia, all of whom have urged the Congress to roll back the president’s regulatory crackdown in an effort to protect their livelihoods.

To make its point, the L.A. Times editorial board cited two examples of the president supposedly abandoned his green base as a sop to industry. The first was the EPA’s decision last week to “indefinitely” delay the implementation of Maximum Achievable Control Technology retrofits on industrial boilers to control the emissions of hazardous air pollutants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. According to the L.A. Times editorial board:

The EPA indefinitely rescinded the proposal this week, citing Obama’s January executive order on regulations and claiming that the agency hadn’t had time to properly address industry concerns about the rule since a draft was released in September…. The economy is the top subject on Americans’ minds, and Obama no doubt figures he can blunt criticism of his regulatory record and maybe corral some independent voters by cutting smokestack industries a little slack. Never mind that the economic calculus doesn’t pencil out; according to EPA estimates, the rule on industrial boilers would cost polluters $1.4 billion a year, but the value of its health benefits would range from $22 billion to $54 billion. And never mind that the rule would prevent up to 6,500 premature deaths each year.

The L.A. Times editorial board made two errors in this passage. The first was to claim that the EPA acted to address industry concerns. To be sure, American industry is aghast at this administrations war on energy, but that wasn’t the reason that the EPA delayed the study. Rather, the EPA acted due to…opposition from within the Obama administration.

That’s right. This wasn’t the first time the EPA tried to delay the rule. It tried last January, after a still-unpublished Commerce Department study eviscerated the EPA’s economic analysis. Despite requests from Republican Members of Congress, the administration won’t release the study. So much for “transparency.”

The L.A. Times editorial board’s second error is related: It parroted the EPA’s ridiculous cost-benefit analysis, the same one that the Commerce Department blew out of the water. To get an idea of what the Commerce Department objected to, read this recent Competitive Enterprise Institute study by Garrett A. Vaughn, “Clearing the Air on the EPA’s False Regulatory Benefit-Cost Estimates and Its Anti-Carbon Agenda.”

The L.A. Times editorial board’s other example of President Obama supposedly forsaking environmentalists is the administration’s having put on the “slow track” new toxic rules for coal ash. OK…so the coal ash rule is on the “slow track”… I’ll grant that to the L.A. Times editorial board. But what about: the Hazardous Air Pollutant Utility MACT, Regional Haze, unprecedented greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, unprecedented tightening of all criteria pollutants for National Ambient Air Quality Standards, a potential re-interpretation of Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to impose a 100-foot buffer rule, the creation of a new “pollutant,” salinity, under the Clean Water Act, and once-through cycling. Every single one of these “fast-track” regulations is targeted at either coal supply or coal demand. The L.A. Times editorial board can’t see the forest for the trees.

The L.A. Times’s whiny editorial evinces a character defect of the environmental movement as a whole. Namely, these green special interests are NEVER satisfied.

Consider this L.A. Times op-ed from last week, “The Wrong Sites for Solar,” in which two environmentalists argued that Obama administration’s push for solar power on federal lands is a bad idea, because it would defile a desert.

Or, note this recent L.A. Times story, about how the Sierra Club is demanding that California Governor Jerry Brown overhaul the State’s plan for a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme, so as to make it more onerous on what’s left of California’s industrial base.

They get solar power…but it’s not good enough, because it might prove inimical to a turtle in a desert wasteland. They get a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme… but it’s not good enough, because it wouldn’t chase away all of California’s “dirty” industry. There’s no winning with environmentalist special interests.

Thanks to the greens’ implacable nature, the energy industry in California is a total basket case, as I explain with Jeremy Lott in this American Spectator piece.

The 2012 presidential election is starting to bend some of the Obama Administration’s environmental and energy policies.  I have noted previously that the White House realizes that gas prices are a huge threat to President Barack Obama’s re-election.  Consequently, the President is trying to shift the blame to oil companies and speculators while at the same time talking up what his Administration is doing to increase domestic oil production.  The reality, of course, is that the Obama Administration has moved across the board to decrease oil production in federal lands and offshore areas.

Another sign of the Administration’s focus on the President’s re-election is that the Environmental Protection Agency has suddenly started paying attention to the concerns of industry.  The timetables for new regulations of coal ash disposal and of surface coal mining in Appalachia have been extended.  EPA announced last week that it was reconsidering, but not delaying, some parts of its new Clean Air Act rule for cement plants.  This week EPA suspended indefinitely a similar rule for industrial boilers that it had promulgated in February.  EPA said that it will conduct more analyses and re-open the public comment period for the boiler rule.

EPA is also considering acceding to requests from Congress and electric utilities to extend the public comment period for its proposed Clean Air Act rule for coal-fired power plants. A good excuse for extending the comment period is that a simple mathematical error in EPA’s calculations has been pointed out by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, a utility industry coalition.

The boiler MACT (which stands for Maximum Achievable Control Technology), cement MACT, and utility MACT rules would limit air emissions of mercury and approximately 70 other metals and other substances.  The delays in finalizing and implementing these three rules may postpone the considerable economic damage that each of them will do until after the election.  Environmental pressure groups are naturally not happy with anything that delays shutting down the U. S. economy, but there are rumors that they have been told by the White House to shut up until after the election.

America is in the midst of a budget crisis, yet the Environmental Protection Agency found $25,000 to help a radical green group break the law. According to the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Gordon,

“…the agency awarded the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization [LVEJO] a $25,000 environmental justice grant, which was to be directed to ‘…work[ing] in coalition with their partners to implement 3 areas of Climate Change Mitigation…’ The first ‘area’ is to ‘…conduct a grassroots Clean Power Campaign in the Chicago Region to address coal power plant emissions’…After getting the grant, a half dozen activists from LVEJO and other groups were arrested after climbing the fence to a coal-fired power plant and unfurling a banner that read: ‘Close Chicago’s Toxic Coal Plant.’”

Read the entire excellent post here.

Three of the Congress’s most influential energy policymakers this week “urged” the Environmental Protection Agency to delay an ultra-costly regulation targeted at coal-fired power plants, the source of 50 percent of America’s electricity generation.  For the sake of keeping the lights on, all Americans should hope the Obama administration heeds these Congressmen’s request.

Senate Environment and Public Works Ranking Member James Inhofe (R-OK), House Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-MI), and House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY) yesterday sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson demanding a longer comment period for a proposed regulation known as the Utility HAP MACT

[The HAP stands for “Hazardous Air Pollutant,” and the MACT stands for "Maximum Achievable Control Technology"; to learn what these terms entail, read this summary of the regulation, Primer: EPA’s Power Plant MACT for Hazardous Air Pollutants.]

The EPA issued the Utility HAP MACT in mid-March, and it gave the public 60 days to comment. The Congressmen “urge the agency [to] extend the comment period to a minimum of 120 days to allow adequate time for stakeholders to assess and comment on the proposal.”

The extended comment period is well warranted. For starters, the EPA included a number of “pollutants” in the proposed regulation that shouldn’t be there. The EPA’s authority to regulate hazardous air pollutants from power plants is derivative of a study on the public health effect of mercury emissions. The EPA’s proposed regulation, however, would regulate acid gases, non-mercury metals, and organic air toxins, in addition to mercury. Yet the EPA’s evidence only pertains to mercury. The EPA’s authority to regulate these non-mercury emissions, despite their not having been a part of the aforementioned study, will be challenged, and the DC Circuit Court ultimately will decide.

Why would the EPA include these non-mercury emissions into its proposed regulation? My guess is that the agency wanted to leave no stone unturned in its war on domestic coal demand. Thanks to an emerging technology known as “sorbent injection,” removing mercury from post-combustion emissions could be achieved at many power plants without having to install flue gas desulphurization equipment, a.k.a. “scrubbers,” which are far more expensive, and which had been the primary method of mercury control. But the EPA wants all power plants to install these “scrubbers.” Consider the title of slide 8 of this EPA presentation on the proposed Utility HAP MACT rule, “Many Exiting Coal Units Lack Advanced Controls.” The only way to ensure that ALL plants have to install expensive “scrubbers” was to include non-mercury “pollutants” into the regulation.

As Inside the EPA reported on March 18,

Despite the focus on mercury emissions, the major upcoming fight over the rule could center on the proposed limits for emissions of other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) including hydrogen chloride (HCl). EPA is proposing to set a “conventional” MACT limit for HCl that will act as a surrogate for limiting acid gases.

The HCl limit could set such strict limits on acid gases that even the smallest coal-fired power plants with the lowest emissions levels might have to install expensive “scrubber” technology to cut their emissions, an industry source has said, boosting concerns from mining and other industries about the rule’s potential costs…

…The National Mining Association (NMA) is warning that the HCl limit has the biggest potential for opposition from industry because it could require almost every coal-fired power plant in the country to invest in expensive scrubbers to reduce acid gas emissions.

The EPA’s Utility MACT overreach engenders serious reliability concerns. Many utilities will find it cheaper to shutter older, smaller units, rather than to install “scrubbers.” According to a study by Bernstein & Associates, mandating scrubbers, which is essentially what the EPA proposes, would result in the premature closure of almost 33,000 megawatts of coal fired power capacity. Moreover, most of that capacity is located east of the Mississippi, and this geographical concentration accentuates the regional threat to grid reliability. To put it another way, if you live in the Ohio Valley, you should be very concerned.

Then there’s the cost. “Scrubbers” entail huge capital expenditures, usually $100 million to $200 million per power plant. The EPA concedes that its proposed Utility HAP MACT regulation would cost $10 billion a year by 2015, making it one of the most expensive regulations, ever. This is likely a low ball. According to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, the price tag is as much as $100 billion a year.

In this era of hyper-partisanship, the mainstream media thinks that bi-partisanship is beautiful…unless both parties agree on an environmental policy, in which case the media invariably recasts the story such that it’s the Green Democrats versus the Dirty Republicans.

On cap-and-trade policy, I’ve noted in a previous post how the media willfully ignores that both parties oppose energy rationing. Instead, you’ll read or hear about the “Republican War on Science,” whenever Congressional climate policy gets rejected by a bipartisan, bicameral vote.

There was another example of this phenomenon last Wednesday. The Energy and Water Subcommittee of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing during which there was unanimous bipartisan agreement that the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its bounds on a controversial policy regarding  mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.

To me, at least, unanimously bipartisan opposition to a major Presidential policy on an ultra-divisive issue is newsworthy. But there was no mention of it in any of the stories on the hearing that I read. Readers of the stories that I read would have thought that the Democrats and Republicans clashed.

The subject of the hearing was the EPA’s issuance of what full Committee Ranking Member Nick Rahall (D-WV) called “do or dare permits,” whereby the EPA threatened to veto surface coal mining permits that failed to meet “non-binding” guidance documents. This is a blatant violation of the federal Administrative Procedure Act. As I explain in detail here, the EPA’s justification for these procedural shenanigans is the protection of an insect that lives for a day, and which isn’t an endangered species.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Timothy Bishop (D-NY) spoke of a “pendulum” between the “non-mutually exclusive” issues of environmental protection and economic activity. He said it had swung too far towards business in the Bush era, and now it appeared to have swung too far in the other direction. Of course, Rahall agreed with the Republicans; he’s from West Virginia, the nation’s second largest coal producing state. Rahall’s constituents suffer most as a result of this Administration’s war on Appalachian coal production. Rep. Jason Altmire (D-PA), offered “our support, as a group…for anything we can do to lessen the burden.” Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA) chided EPA Acting Assistant Administrator Stoner, saying, ““When an issue raises to the level of the Congress, you know there’s a problem.”

To be sure, Rep. Bishop aggressively defended the EPA from the rhetorical claim, made by one witness, that the Obama Administration was waging a “war on coal” in order to fulfill the President’s promise to “bankrupt coal,” but he also allowed that EPA had gone too far when he made his pendulum analogy. Again, Rep. Rahall’s willingness to check the EPA was never in doubt. Rep. Altmire is from Appalachian PA, where surface coal mining is practiced (although there has been a dramatic conversion from surface to underground mines there over the last decade), but I couldn’t find any evidence of mountaintop removal coal mines in that State. Rep. Richardson’s skepticism of the EPA’s actions was most striking, given that her district is as far from Appalachia as it gets.

Remarkable, right? Perhaps, but it wasn’ newsworthy. In fact, if you didn’t attend the hearing, but you read media accounts of the hearing, your knowledge of what took place would be the opposite of what took place.

In the trade publication I rely on for energy and environment news, the write up of the hearing mentioned that two Democrats defended the EPA from purple rhetoric used by witnesses and Republicans. The story never mentioned that these Democrats ultimately agreed with Republicans on the need to check the EPA. And on the blog that I rely for detailed information about the Appalachian coal industry, a post on the hearing was titled “EPA, Democrats Respond to Coal Attacks.”