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Posts Tagged ‘EPA’
July 18th, 2018 at 2:18 pm
Image of the Day: Trump Destroying the Planet, Cont’d
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From withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord to his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump is obviously destroying the planet:

Trump Is Destroying the Planet

Trump Is Destroying the Planet

January 29th, 2016 at 8:34 am
More Executive Overreach: The EPA and “Cap and Trade”
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In an interview with the Center for Individual Freedom, William Yeatman, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses the EPA’s Clean Power Plan overreach and why the Model FIP is a cap-and-trade policy and thereby raises concerns under the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Listen to the interview here.

August 4th, 2015 at 11:08 pm
Obama’s Clean Coal Initiative: A Warning from California
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The Los Angeles Times‘ front-page headline Tuesday comes across as remarkably upbeat: “California is ahead of the game as Obama releases Clean Power Plan.”

But the story’s lead paragraph reads more like a threat than a promise: “President Obama’s plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants over the next 15 years will force states to address climate change by pushing them to act more like California.”

The president cited California’s example when he announced the plan on Monday, recalling the smog that hung over the Los Angeles basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “You fast-forward 30, 40 years later, and we solved those problems,” Obama said.

Well, yes, we did — and it’s a good thing, too. But the president is conflating those clean-air rules with policies of a more recent vintage.

California has led the way in pushing utilities to adopt renewable energy from sources such as windmills and solar panels in lieu of natural gas and coal-fired plants. According to the Times: “In 2013, the most recent year available, nearly 19% of California’s electricity came from renewable sources, while less than 8% came from coal, according to the California Energy Commission. In January, Brown proposed an ambitious target of 50% renewables by 2030.”

The story doesn’t mention, however, that the Golden State ranks close to the top in terms of energy prices. It’s no coincidence that the cost of renewable energy in California increased by 55 percent between 2003 and 2013, as the renewable portfolio standard was being phased in. And costs will continue to rise, in no small part because the state Public Utilities Commission earlier this year ordered changes in California’s tiered pricing for electricity, moving from four tiers to two. As a result, the first tier rate will increase significantly, and the second tier rate will rise marginally.

The Times also reports that California is on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 as required under AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act” of 2006. Gov. Jerry Brown in January issued an executive order that would accelerate the mandate’s requirements, with the goal of reducing emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. Expect rates to go higher still.

Not surprisingly, Brown hailed Obama’s plan as “bold and absolutely necessary.”

But a new Manhattan Institute report by Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics highlights the real consequences of California’s decarbonization efforts, some unintended, some not. Among Lesser’s key findings:

  • California households’ electricity prices have risen as a result of the state’s renewable-energy mandates and carbon cap-and-trade program—and will likely continue to rise at an even faster rate in coming years.
  • The aforementioned policies have created a regressive energy tax, imposing proportionally higher costs in certain counties, such as California’s inland and Central Valley regions, where summer electricity consumption is highest but household incomes are lowest.
  • In 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced “energy poverty”—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.

This is the model that President Obama lauds and his EPA wants to emulate. The EPA’s new regulations would mandate that states cut carbon emissions 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

A tough Wall Street Journal editorial notes that the EPA’s final rule “is 9 percent steeper than the draft the Environmental Protection Agency issued in June 2014,” and opines: “The damage to growth, consumer incomes and U.S. competitiveness will be immense—assuming the rule isn’t tossed by the courts or rescinded by the next Administration.”

Steven F. Hayward, a professor of politics at Pepperdine University and an expert in environmental policy, observed in a post at Power Line on Monday, “By [EPA’s] own admission, full implementation of the emissions targets will avert only 0.018 degrees C of warming by the year 2100. I’m sure we’ll all notice that much change in temps!”

The final rule is nearly 1,600 pages long, and the regulatory impact analysis is nearly 400 pages, so needless to say it will take some time for the lawyers and wonks to sort everything out. But Hayward found an odd paragraph in near the middle of the impact analysis that led him to wonder if the government is putting us on:

As indicated in the RIA [Regulatory Impact Assessment] for this rule, we expect that the main impact of this rule on the nation’s mix of generation will be to reduce coal-fired generation, but in an amount and by a rate that is consistent with recent historical declines in coal-fired generation. Specifically, from approximately 2005 to 2014, coal-fired generation declined at a rate that was greater than the rate of reduced coal-fired generation that we expect from this rulemaking from 2015 to 2030. In addition, under this rule, the trends for all other types of generation, including natural gas-fired generation, nuclear generation, and renewable generation, will remain generally consistent with what their trends would be in the absence of this rule. [Hayward’s emphasis.]

Hayward poses a fascinating question: “if the electricity sector under this new regulation is going to unfold more or less along the lines of business as usual, why are we bothering with this regulation in the first place? Is the EPA seriously admitting that their regulation does nothing substantial at all, or that they’ve spotted a parade going down the street and decided to march at the head of it?”

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors encourage a vigorous legal challenge to the new rules, noting:

The Supreme Court did give EPA the authority to regulate carbon emissions in Mass. v. EPA in 2007. But that was not a roving license to do anything the EPA wants. The High Court has rebuked the agency twice in the last two years for exceeding its statutory powers.

“When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy, we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism,” the Court warned last year. “We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.”

Congress did no such thing with the Clean Power Plan, which is a new world balanced on a fragment of the Clear Air Act called Section 111(d). This passage runs a couple hundred words and was added to the law in 1977, well before the global warming stampede. Historically Section 111(d) has applied “inside the fence line,” meaning the EPA can set performance standards for individual plants, not for everything connected to those sources that either produces or uses electricity.

When the EPA rule does arrive before the Justices, maybe they’ll rethink their doctrine of “Chevron deference,” in which the judiciary hands the bureaucracy broad leeway to interpret ambiguous laws. An agency using a 38-year-old provision as pretext for the cap-and-tax plan that a Democratic Congress rejected in 2010 and couldn’t get 50 Senate votes now is the all-time nadir of administrative “interpretation.”

“This plan is essentially a tax on the livelihood of every American,” the Journal‘s editorial concludes, “which makes it all the more extraordinary that it is essentially one man’s order.” As California goes, so goes the nation? Let’s hope not.

February 24th, 2015 at 4:26 pm
Fed Regs May Level Playing Field between California & Texas

Texas has long been held up as the free market alternative to California’s regulation-heavy approach to public policy. Companies like Raytheon and Toyota have relocated because of the cheaper price of doing business, as have thousands of individuals.

But the competitive advantage that Texas enjoys over California could come to a screeching halt if the federal government imposes California-style regulations on the states.

The description of a March 12 event in Houston explains the threat.

“California’s tough environmental rules and planning represent the wave of the future to many planners and pundits, as well as to large parts of the federal government,” says the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. “The goal is to rein in ‘sprawl,’ based largely on questionable environmental and urban design considerations. California consciously seeks to impose a high-density, transit-focused future on the residents of the state.”

It continues, “But California’s policies do not just affect Californians. Many federal agencies, including the EPA and US Fish and Wildlife Service, have embraced the Golden State’s regulations on climate change, wetland and endangered species protections, as role models to be adopted nationally. As California-style regulations diffuse through the federal government, Texas business could soon be subject to many of the same programs and policies.”

This is a good reminder that vigilance at the federal level is necessary to protect economic freedom back home.

December 29th, 2014 at 12:03 pm
Liberal Harvard Law Prof Calls Obama’s EPA “Lawless”

It’s not every day that the leading liberal law professor in America calls out the actions of the Obama Environmental Protection Agency as “lawless” and “unconstitutional.”

“After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority,” writes Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

The EPA is launching a “Clean Power Plan” that will require state governments to enact restrictions on local electrical power plants in an effort to fight global climate change. As Tribe sees it, the EPA “would effectively dictate the energy mix used in each state and leave the state with essentially no choice in implementing its plan.” Such an arrangement would violate numerous Supreme Court decisions that prohibit “federal commandeering of state governments” because it “defeats political accountability and violates principles of federalism that are basic to our constitutional order.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time President Obama has exceeded his constitutional authority to implement a controversial policy. It fits a pattern of executive action unrestrained by seemingly any qualms over violating clear statutory limitations.

And even though Tribe doesn’t make the obvious analogy to ObamaCare’s politically corrupt origin, he doesn’t pass up the opportunity to highlight what’s really motivating the EPA’s new regulatory scheme: “The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate change legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.”

Change the author’s byline and this article easily could be written by any constitutional conservative. Realizing that it comes instead from one of the leading proponents of the “living constitution” school, and it’s obvious that Obama & Co. are far beyond the boundaries of what even the most celebrated liberal academic scholar considers lawful executive action.

August 7th, 2014 at 6:18 pm
Would President Romney Be Allowed to Disregard the Law?

Robert Delahunty, a former Department of Justice attorney, poses an interesting counterfactual to those defending President Barack Obama’s possible legalization of 5 million illegal immigrants.

“One has to wonder how those who consider such non-enforcement to be constitutional would react if a President Mitt Romney announced that his Internal Revenue Service would simply stop collecting capital gains tax on the rich, or that his Environmental Protection Agency would no longer seek to impose legal penalties on polluters,” writes Delahunty.

Delahunty’s thought experiment is worth elaborating. If it’s true that presidents can assume lawmaking powers when Congress refuses to implement his will – a point I’m only granting for the sake of argument; Articles I and II of the Constitution clearly foreclose this possibility – then it stands to reason that any Republican running for president in 2016 can simply campaign on a promise not to enforce any law he does not like. Why worry with winning control of Congress? All any political party needs to do is win one race – the presidency – and the entire executive branch can be put in the service of the party’s platform.

It’s an outcome so at odds with our constitutional system that in saner days it would have been ruled out as a serious option as soon as it was floated. But we are in transformative times. Future presidents and their would-be advisors are taking notes. If President Obama is allowed to get away with such a regime-shattering power grab – and unilaterally importing 5 million new citizens would be just that – then there is very little reason to justify limits on even bigger abuses hereafter.

June 6th, 2014 at 9:40 am
Podcast – New EPA Emissions Rules: A Misguided Pursuit
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In an interview with CFIF, Lance Brown, Executive Director of Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy, discusses the EPA’s misguided attempt to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, the costs associated with the recent proposal and why President Obama is wrong in suggesting that reducing carbon will prevent asthma or heart attacks.

Listen to the interview here.

November 15th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
Brace Yourself: Feds Take Sensible Step on Energy Policy
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It’s rare that we get anything other than green inanity in federal energy policy these days, which is why this news is so welcome. From Ben German at The Hill:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is cutting the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that must be blended into the nation’s fuel supply, a victory for oil companies that call the federal ethanol mandate unworkable.

On Friday, the EPA proposed draft 2014 blending volumes under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that are lower than the 2013 requirements, and far less than called for in a 2007 law that expanded the mandate.

The EPA is proposing to require 15.21 billion gallons in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013, marking the first time the agency has lowered the target from the prior year.

A senior administration official said the Obama administration is firmly supportive of biofuels, but said  “market, infrastructure and other constraints” warrant paring back the mandate.

If you’re wondering when the hell the Obama Administration actually started worrying about the real-life effects of their policies, the answer is: when it put them at cross-purposes with a well-financed lobby. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The EPA says it is trying to fix a problem known as the “blend wall,” which occurs when the annual requirement mandated by Congress exceeds the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into conventional blends of gasoline.

Oil companies and refiners have been warning of the blend wall for several years. If the EPA had stuck to Congress’s original target, refiners said they would have hit the blend wall in 2014 for the first time.

Which, of course, the ethanol lobby is using as an argument that this whole thing is one big gift from the government to “big oil.” That’s pretty rich coming from an industry that wouldn’t exist at any substantial scale without political collusion.

What’s the difference between ethanol and gasoline? You don’t need to pass laws to create a market for gasoline. The oil industry isn’t looking for special favors in this case; it’s looking from relief from a government-imposed drag on its business. The ethanol folks, meanwhile, are the ones trying to use state power to force people into buying their product. Which one sounds more corrupt to you?

As Drew noted earlier this week, ethanol is one big disaster. It doesn’t work in terms of economics, it doesn’t work in terms of energy, and it doesn’t work in terms of the environment. In a perfect world, we would’ve been able to abolish its mandate outright. In this flawed one, seeing it reduced at any level is a welcome change of pace.

November 12th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
The AP Condemns Government Ethanol Policy

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

October 4th, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Feds Mandate Non-Existent Solution for Non-Existent Problem
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In my column last week, I wrote about how rapidly predictions of catastrophic global warming are unraveling. Despite the fact that the case for skepticism is probably better than ever, the Obama Administration is still proceeding with new EPA regulations to cap carbon emissions, which will have the practical effect of crippling the coal industry.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about this crusade is that the EPA claims the problem can be handled through carbon sequestration — a technology that’s not commercially viable (though this should come as no surprise coming from the same people that think solar and wind power are the wave of the future). As Larry Bell notes at Forbes:

EPA’s latest climate battle plan is to prohibit construction of new coal-fired power plants that can’t achieve 1,100 pound per megawatt hour carbon emission limits. To accomplish this will require plant operators to capture and store (“sequester”) excess CO2, something that cannot be accomplished through affordable means, if at all. [The Institute for Energy Research estimates] that this “regulatory assault” will eliminate 35 gig watts of electrical generating capacity…10% of all U.S. power. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant.”

The liberal environmental establishment wants to bankrupt the coal industry. That’s their prerogative. But they should at least be honest about it instead of acting like they’re simply helping the industry transition to the next best thing. Perhaps they could take a page out of this fella’s book:

July 16th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
New Poll: U.S. Coal Industry More Popular Than EPA
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Here’s something that might restore some of your faith in popular culture and the evolving American electorate.  According to a new Rasmussen survey, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is less popular than the coal industry that it is trying to destroy:

Voters view the U.S. coal industry more favorably than the Environmental Protection Agency and are closely divided when asked if the Obama administration’s ultimate goal is to kill that industry.  Fifty-one percent (51%) of likely U.S. voters view the U.S. coal industry at least somewhat favorably.  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 29% hold an unfavorable opinion of it.”

Along with Obama himself, it appears that his administrative agencies are paying a price for their continuing lawlessness.

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June 27th, 2013 at 2:13 pm
Puncturing Liberal Climate Change Pretension in a Single Tweet
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In my column this week, I take aim at President Obama’s announcement earlier this week that he’s unilaterally moving the EPA towards forcing carbon emission reductions on coal producers. Of course, this will impact the job prospects of precisely the sort of everymen that liberals claim to champion, an observation rendered beautifully concise by Rupert Darwall writing at the Prospect blog:

A brilliant tweet at the time of the Thatcher funeral encapsulates the left’s ideological confusion—being in favour of coal miners and against what they mined.

December 4th, 2012 at 2:18 pm
New North Dakota Senator to Obama: “You’re Wrong on Energy”

NBC News quotes U.S. Senator-Elect Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) from a campaign debate on what she would say to President Barack Obama about his energy policy:

“You’re wrong on energy. You’re headed in the wrong direction. You made bad decisions,” she said, according to The Associated Press. “You promised that you would promote clean coal technologies, that you would be a champion of coal, and you haven’t done it.” She also urged the president to replace Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

Certainly, that kind of independence helped Heitkamp eke out a win in a state Mitt Romney won by 20 points.  Now that she’s earned the right to speak her mind in the U.S. Senate, let’s see if she’s willing to make good on her promise.  With the coal industry staring at death by a thousand regulations, the sooner the better.

September 24th, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Elizabeth Warren and the Truth about Environmental Hoaxes

Last week, in her first debate with U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren tried to nationalize their contest in terms designed to solidify her support from Bay State environmentalists:

“Senator Brown has been going around the country, talking to people, saying, you’ve got to contribute to his campaign because it may be for the control of the Senate.  And he’s right.  …  What that would mean is if the Republicans take over control of the Senate, Jim Inhofe would become the person who would be in charge of the committee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.  He’s a man that has called global warming ‘a hoax.’  In fact, that’s the title of his book.”

To be fair to Senator Inhofe, who, as the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is in line to lead the panel if Republicans become the majority, the full title of his book is The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

The hoax Inhofe describes is the use of Climategate-manipulated science to legitimize massive increases in taxes and regulation.

In its war on coal, the EPA has been at the forefront of the environmentalists’ push to tax and regulate an entire industry out of existence; most specifically by requiring coal operators to adopt expensive and experimental manufacturing techniques that are already making it necessary to lay off workers and close down plants.

By parsing Inhofe’s insight about how global warming alarmists politicize science to justify liberal policies, Warren was trying to substitute Inhofe’s complete rejection of global warming for Brown’s position on the issue.  In fact, Brown thinks global warming/climate change/something is happening.  But like Inhofe, he thinks that getting the job market growing again trumps spending billions of dollars on policies built in part on scientific fraud.

Brown shouldn’t shy away from this issue so long as he frames it correctly.  The environmental activists that Warren was playing to won’t be voting for him anyway.  But the independents that put Brown in office two years ago know that job-killing taxes and regulations don’t make sense; especially in an era of chronic unemployment.

July 3rd, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Appeals Court Says EPA Can Regulate Greenhouse Gases, Congress Flatfooted

In one of my other incarnations I teach public policy and legal interpretation at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.  One of the cases we discuss every fall is Massachusetts v. EPA, a controversial standing decision by the Supreme Court that allowed the Bay State and others to bend the rules for suing the EPA for not regulating greenhouse gases.

This was in the halcyon days of the George W. Bush Administration when conservative EPA appointees had the temerity to point out that the Clean Air Act gave the agency no authorization to interpret carbon dioxide as pollution to be regulated.

No bother, said then-Justice John Paul Stevens in his majority opinion that included Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of last week’s immigration decision in Arizona v. U.S.  In the EPA case, Justice Stevens said that states like Massachusetts are due “special solicitude” when litigating at the federal bar, especially when their sovereignty is threatened by eroding coastlines thanks to future speculated rises in sea levels from global warming.  (I’ll bet Arizona Governor Jan Brewer would have liked Justice Kennedy to remember her state’s “special solicitude” regarding the integrity of its borders.)

Now we’ve got a different Administration and a different outcome.  The Obama EPA was all too happy to make the carbon dioxide endangerment finding the Supreme Court made possible.  The energy industry sued claiming EPA lacked jurisdiction, and last Tuesday the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld EPA’s unenumerated power to redefine pollution.

Unless the Supreme Court intervenes and overrules the D.C. Circuit, the fight will now move to how EPA uses its newfound regulatory power.  What are the likely outcomes?  The New York Times summarizes two of the main arguments:

“This decision ensures that a regulatory approach to emissions cuts will take place, whether or not Congress acts legislatively,” said Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit group that specializes in energy and environmental issues. “The question is, does the industry push Congress to develop a more efficient, less costly approach now that regulation is inevitable?”

But Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said that Congress’s refusal to approve greenhouse gas limits constituted a decision and that lawmakers should act now to reverse the E.P.A. emissions rules. Carbon regulation “threatens to drive energy prices higher, destroy jobs and hamstring our economic recovery,” he said.

So, an overweening federal agency emboldened by implied powers of regulatory control is going to act “whether or not Congress acts legislatively”?  My sympathies are with Chairman Upton’s point that no decision is a decision, but that’s clearly not a roadblock to activist bureaucrats with case precedent on their side.  It’s time for Congress to get back in the game and rein in the administrative state with clear and direct commands.  They know how to write those kinds of statutes.  It’s time they did more of it.

May 23rd, 2012 at 1:34 pm
A Sign the End is Near
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I think we can all agree that this is probably the death rattle of American liberty. From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama’s eco-friendly EPA inked a green partnership deal with high-octane NASCAR Monday to promote recycling and environmentally-friendly products to the sport’s millions of fans.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASCAR will encourage fans to buy “sustainable concessions” at races, expand the use of “safer chemical products,” conserve water, reduce waste, promote recycling, push products approved by the EPA that have a small enviro footprint and encourage suppliers to get an “E3 tuneup” aimed at promoting sustainable manufacturing.

Yes, you read that right: NASCAR. Civic religion of the red states. Featuring cars that reach speeds around 200 MPH, with fuel economies as low as two miles per gallon.

We’ve gone ’round the bend, ladies and gentlemen. All we can hope is that someday this will be included in the chronicles of the last, delusional days of the Obama Administration.

April 27th, 2012 at 7:55 am
Podcast: The Foolishness of Gov’t Bans on Plastic Bags and Make-up
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Angela Logomasini, senior fellow for the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses how misguided and oftentimes foolish some activists are in calling for bans on plastic bags and certain cosmetics.  Logomasini makes the case for why the use of junk science must be stopped.

Listen to the interview here.

March 21st, 2012 at 11:31 am
Property Rights Win… UNANIMOUSLY

Back in January, attorney Robert Smith wrote a great piece at The American Spectator explaining the importance of Sackett v. EPA, in which the federal agency told landowners they didn’t even have the right to gain access to federal courts to challenge EPA’s administrative ruling that the Sacketts’ property was a “wetland” (which it manifestly is not). Today, the Supreme Court came down like a ton of bricks on the EPA and its Obama overlords. It didn’t just rule in favor of the landowners (thus sending the case back to lower courts to be heard on the merits); it did so without dissent. As in the Hosanna-Tabor case implicating religious liberty, even the four liberal justices ruled against the administration.

This is important. It means that property rights still matter, despite the manifold attempted deprivations thereof by the Obama administration.

Thank goodness.

November 15th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Perry Comes Alive
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Rick Perry got some (admittedly earned) grief last week after a cringe-worthy moment at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn’t recall the third of three cabinet departments he wants to abolish (for the record, they were the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and — the one he blanked on — the Department of Energy).

The media fixation on the gaffe overshadowed a bigger point: Rick Perry is proposing some of the most dramatic reforms to the federal government of any presidential candidate in decades. At a speech in Iowa earlier today, the Texas governor laid out an agenda that makes clear that the cabinet proposals were far from an aberration. Check out this list of proposals from the remarks:

  • Term-limiting federal judges
  • Converting Congress into a part-time legislature, with half the salary and half the staff
  • Tying legislative pay to balancing the budget
  • Bringing federal spending down to 18 percent of GDP
  • Passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution
  • Privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
  • Privatizing the TSA
  • Dramatically scaling down and repurposing the EPA
  • Performing a full audit of the federal government
  • Creating an across-the-board moratorium on new federal regulations and auditing all regulations from the past five years
  • Freezing federal salaries (Except for military and law enforcement) and cutting the president’s salary in half until there is a balanced budget.

Perry may be faltering in the polls, but this list reminds us why he was a contender in the first place. At the very least, let’s hope that the eventual Republican nominee has the good sense to co-opt this agenda.

November 4th, 2011 at 6:01 pm
Obama Losing Blue Collar Voters

Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal summarizes the winners and losers in the fight between the environmental left and blue collar union workers:

The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can’t count that high). The administration blew up Louisiana’s offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country’s one booming industry: natural gas.

Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don’t care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president’s attack on their work.

The 2012 electorate is ripe for another GOP presidential candidate able to pick-up thousands of ‘Reagan Democrats’ in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.  The fact that all three states elected Republican governors in 2010 sets the table for a nominee able to wrap free market principles in a populist appeal.  The question is, will someone craft a message in time to take advantage of Obama’s foolishness?