On May 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (“USACE”) proposed new Guidance to clarify which waters of the United States are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act (“CWA”). If implemented as is, this Guidance document would increase significantly the authority of the federal government and it also would have a major economic impact. That is, it’s a major new policy. Yet it was never approved by the Congress. So it is another Obama power grab. (My colleague Marlo Lewis has covered extensively the EPA’s global warming power grab. Another colleague, Chris Horner, wrote a book on the subject.)
Unlike President Obama’s other power grabs, which are largely unprecedented, the history of federal jurisdiction under the CWA is characterized by the EPA and USACE seizing as much authority as they can. Therefore, the President’s Guidance document is taking a tradition of federal expansion to its extreme bounds. What follows is a primer that explains the context of President Obama’s Clean Water Act Guidance.
The National Chamber Foundation’s Campaign for Free Enterprise has announced that Jeffrey Immelt will be the keynote speaker at their Jobs for America Summit on July 11 at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, is America’s leading crony capitalist and promoter of cap-and-trade legislation. No word on whether the speakers will include fellow cap-and-trade promoters Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, and John Bryson, former CEO of Edison International, whom President Obama has nominated to be Secretary of Commerce. These proponents of energy-rationing polices are willing to raise energy prices and thereby make people poorer and destroy American jobs because they calculate that it will boost their companies’ profits.
File this one under regulatory trainwreck. NERA Economic Consulting has just published a study on the combined economic impacts of EPA’s Clean Air Transport (CATR) Rule and Utility Maximum Available Control Technology (MACT) Rule.
NERA estimates the rules will impose $184 billion in cumulative costs on the electricity sector, increase average U.S. electricity prices in 2016 by 12%, and reduce net U.S. employment by 1.4 million jobsduring 2013-2020.
“It is important to note that this report only covers CATR and Utility MACT,” comments Brandon Plank of the Republic Policy Committee. “It does not include the costs of EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act, New Source Performance Standards for refineries and utilities, ozone and particulate matter standards, reclassification of coal ash, etc.” (See chart below.)
Here is the NERA study’s summary of key results: [click to continue…]
Liberal partisans claim that Republicans are at “war” with science, based largely on former President George W. Bush’s supposedly anti-science disposition, but they present only half the story. A strong case can be made that the Obama administration, too, is warring with science. Consider,
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How long will scientists have to measure annual economic damages from hurricanes before they can confidently say that global warming is making storms stronger? In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claimed the evidence is already clear in the damage trends of the last several decades. But a new study finds that any warming-related increase in hurricane damages won’t be detectable for a century a more. [click to continue…]
Tonight in Taylorville, Illinois, the Department of Energy will hold the first of 3 field hearings on the environmental impact of FutureGen 2.0, America’s biggest boondoggle.
If you are unacquainted with FutureGen, it was George W. Bush’s marquee energy initiative, a $1 billion public-private partnership to build a coal-fired power plant that “captured” greenhouse gas emissions and piped them underground for storage.
President Bush proposed the project in 2003, but the Congress initially was skeptical. In 2005, the House Appropriations Committee rejected Bush’s request for FutureGen funding. Members called it a “maybe” program, too risky to merit the investment.
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The head of General Motors, Dan Akerson, has called for an increase in the gasoline tax of up to one dollar a gallon. Akerson’s proposal illustrates, in a nutshell, the perversity of the federal government’s fuel economy standards for new vehicles.
The program is known as CAFE (for Corporate Average Fuel Economy). CAFE has been criticized on several grounds: it limits consumer choice; it jacks up the price of new vehicles; it forces new fuel-saving technologies to be rapidly employed without adequate testing; and, worst of all, it increases traffic fatalities by forcing cars to be made smaller and lighter, reducing their crashworthiness. CAFE’s advocates claim that the law saves consumers money in the long run by reducing their gasoline costs, but if that’s true then we wouldn’t need a federal law imposing these technologies on the public.
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An article in yesterday’s UK Mail.Online provides another stark reminder of the inexorable law of unintended consequences. “California’s attempts to switch to green energy have inadvertently put the survival of the state’s golden eagles at risk,” writes reporter David Gardner. [click to continue…]
Oklahoma last week became the latest State to launch high profile litigation against the Environmental Protection Agency. The subject of the Sooner State’s lawsuit is the Regional Haze provision of the Clean Air Act. For a Regional Haze primer, click here. Suffice it to say, Regional Haze is an aesthetic regulation meant to improve the vistas at national parks, not a public health standard meant to protect human beings. Also, it affords States a uniquely large discretion among Clean Air Act provisions.
In late 2010, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission approved a Regional Haze implementation plan that would switch fuels from coal to natural gas at six power plants. Fuel switching is a drastic response, especially for an aesthetic regulation, but it wasn’t good enough for the EPA, which is demanding that the switch take place 10 years sooner. If not, the EPA is requiring pollution controls that would increase electricity prices in Oklahoma by 10 to 12 percent.
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