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.
[click to continue…]
This blog has kept a close eye on the Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive expansion of its own authority (see here and here). The latest such power grab is taking place in the western United States, where the EPA is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. These Franken-regs are being used to trump the states’ rightful authority on visibility-improvement policy and impose billions of dollars of emissions controls for benefits that are literally invisible.
In 1977 and 1990, Congress passed amendments to the Clean Air Act providing that states work together to improve visibility at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. Together, these amendments are known as the Regional Haze provision. Notably, this provision accords states a uniquely high degree of control relative to the EPA. According to the EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze implementation guidelines, “[T]he [Clean Air] Act and legislative history indicate that Congress evinced a special concern with insuring that States would be the decision-makers” on visibility-improvement policy making. The courts, too, have interpreted the Clean Air Act such that states have primacy on Regional Haze decision making. In the seminal case American Corn Growers v. EPA (2001), which set boundaries between the states and the EPA on Regional Haze policy, the D.C. Circuit Court remanded the EPA’s 1999 Regional Haze implementation guidelines for encroaching on states’ authority.
[click to continue…]
Representative Steve Pearce (R-New Mexico) yesterday removed his name as a co-sponsor of H. R. 1380, which I have dubbed the T. Boone Pickens Earmark Bill. Rep. Pearce is an outstanding conservative Member of Congress, who is policy oriented and held in high regard by his colleagues, so his defection from the Boonedoggle Bandwagon is an important sign that House conservatives may be starting to rethink their support. Pearce deserves special credit because the oil and gas industry, which would benefit from the Pickens-Your-Pocket Plan, is the largest industry in his southern New Mexico district.
5. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
Christie’s skepticism of global warming alarmism is great. What’s not so great is his continued participation in a regional cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. For whatever reason, the climate skeptic sounding governor has yet to pull his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the aforementioned energy tax.
4. Florida Governor Charlie Crist (lame duck)
In 2007, Crist signed a series of environmentalist executive orders, which, thankfully, never came to fruition because they were spurned by the State Legislature. Crist earned his spot on this list for his invertebrate take on offshore drilling. When he campaigned for Governor, he opposed offshore drilling; when gas prices spiked in the summer of 2008, he supported drilling; and after the Gulf oil spill this past summer, he reverted back to opposing the practice.
3. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (lame-duck)
As I’ve explained here, here, and here, the Governator’s environmentalist pandering is empty blathering. For all the talk about California going green, the fact of the matter is that California’s environmentalist energy policies have been ineffectual at achieving anything other than higher energy prices. Rather than environmentalist accomplishments, Schwarzenegger’s only lasting legacy will be the almost-unlimited power he has bequeathed to his successor, Governor-elect Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown. Starting in 2011, the law accords the Governor amorphous, yet absolute, authority to mitigate climate change.
2. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (lame duck)
Using authority derived from 1978 state law, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D) last month imposed a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. The lame-duck Governor enacted the energy-rationing scheme administratively on November 2, the same day that voters indicated their displeasure with expensive energy climate policies by electing Susana Martinez (R) to succeed Richardson. She had campaigned against cap-and-trade. To be sure, Richardson’s energy policy is largely toothless; nonetheless, the executive power grab is disconcerting.
1. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter (lame duck)
It will take a generation for Coloradans to undo the harm inflicted by the Governor Bill Ritter’s much-ballyhooed “New Energy Economy.” At Ritter’s behest: the General Assembly changed the mission of state utilities from providing “least cost” electricity, to fighting climate change; the Public Utilities Commission allowed the nation’s first carbon tax; and Department of Public Health and Environment exaggerated the threat of federal air quality regulations in order to justify legislation that picks winners and losers in the electricity industry.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org