In an op-ed published today on The Hill’s Congress Blog, CFIF Vice President Timothy Lee warns that “regardless of what occurs on November 2,”  the EPA’s regulatory agenda moving forward threatens to hit consumers and business hard and right where it hurts: their pocketbooks.

Lee writes:

When we ring in the New Year in just two short months, next week’s elections will be in our collective rear view mirror. However — regardless of what occurs on Nov. 2 — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) campaign to impose its new round of economy-wide environmental regulations will continue in 2011. That should worry every American, because EPA’s wish list will hit consumers and business where it hurts: their pocketbooks.

Supported by an administration that has suffered defeat after defeat on Capitol Hill in its attempt to pass wholesale climate change legislation, EPA instead seeks to impose its costly and burdensome regulatory agenda through the back door. From overly complex new greenhouse gas rules to more stringent ozone standards to new mandates for recycled coal ash, unelected EPA bureaucrats hope to decree through regulatory fiat what they can’t enact through the democratic or legislative processes.

If successful, EPA’s agenda could cost American families $3,000 per year, according to Heritage Foundation estimates. …

Read the entire piece here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses President Obama’s recent praise of Chevrolet’s new taxpayer-subsidized electric car – the Chevy Volt – as the first step towards realizing his vision for a clean energy economy.  Calling it “the perfect metaphor for the Obama Administration,”  Giachino says the Volt “costs too much, does too little, and can’t live up to the media hype.”

In an interview with CFIF’s Renee Giachino, Florida State Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Ft. Walton Beach) discusses the federal government’s slow response to the BP oil spill, the need for a special session of the Florida legislature and the spill’s implications for the country’s energy policy.

Listen to the interview here.

Today’s BigGovernment.com queue includes our commentary on the disturbingly cozy marriage of convenience between BP and the Obama Administration.

BP and the Obama Agenda

By Timothy H. Lee

For years, liberals in Washington have tirelessly thwarted America from tapping its domestic sources of energy, while hypocritically lamenting our “addiction to foreign oil.” They have forsworn abundant energy supplies just off our coasts and erected boundaries against drilling and energy development right here at home. The unfortunate effect of their effort is to unnecessarily drive exploration further and further offshore, to deeper and deeper depths.

Suddenly, those same forces are forging a marriage of convenience with BP to scapegoat the entire energy industry for BP’s individualized failures. In his Oval Office speech to the nation, for instance, President Obama resorted to sloppy slurs against “oil industry lobbyists” and “an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.” …

Read the entire piece here.

At least Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is signaling an overall legislative strategy: Get (Me) Reelected! According to Byron York’s reporting, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was “fuming” when he was double-crossed by Reid’s decision to gin up the Hispanic vote in Nevada to increase their turnout for his ailing reelection campaign. The move had the consequence of booting Graham’s carefully crafted energy bill off the Senate’s table for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully, after the health care deem-and-scheme travesty and now this personal affront, Senator Graham will learn something the rest of us surmised about Washington’s Democratic leadership from the beginning: there are no honest brokers leading the party today. Forget that at your peril.

According to the Department of Labor, the cost of living in America is humming along at an affordable rate, so long as increases in the price of food and energy are ignored.  You read that right: food and energy.  If there is a third category that every American uses more on a daily basis, let me know.  Ignoring the continuing increases in the costs of food and energy to claim the economy isn’t worsening for everyday Americans is like calculating unemployment to exclude people who don’t have a job and stopped looking.  Oh, wait…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had some big news to announce yesterday.  So in typical Washington fashion, she did what any politician would do.  Pelosi called a press conference.  Her big news?  With the Capitol Hill press corps huddled before her, the Speaker announced that she had spent $140,000 in taxpayer money on new “energy efficient” light fixtures and window shades for the House cafeteria.

But that’s not all.  The fancy new light fixtures and window shades, which automatically raise and lower based on the amount of sunlight that shines through, were a bargain, according to Pelosi and Stephen Ayers, the Architect of the Capitol.  Indeed, Ayers bragged:

I think this fixture was $800 a year ago, and it’s now just over $300, so in one year that’s a pretty significant savings – which allows us to begin using this kind of equipment and technology, because we’re able to get a good return on investment.  At $800 a fixture we can’t get a good return on investment, but when it gets down to $300 – and I’m sure it will go even lower – we’re able to get a good return on investment.”

And just how “good” will that “return on investment” be?  So “good” that Ayers and Pelosi believe that, based on estimates of what will be saved in energy costs, it will only take, well, a mere decade for the light fixtures and window shades to pay for themselves. 

Okay, okay.   What’s $140,000 in the grand scheme of things?  Especially when you consider the federal deficit will exceed $1.5 trillion this year alone.  But that’s not the point.

At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, and millions more are taking to the streets to protest excessive government spending, including the Speaker’s push to cripple the U.S. economy with a “climate change” bill complete with a job-killing Cap-and-Trade scheme, it’s the symbolism of it all.

We’re sure there are many Americans who would love to replace the light fixtures and window treatments in their homes.  But times are tough.  Just as the average American family has been forced to do without new luxuries for their house, with record deficits strangling the federal budget, the time has long passed for Pelosi to do without in hers too!

One of the measures of successful politicians is how much legislation they author, sponsor, and pass.  Since the activities can be counted, the more a legislator does, the more he can claim to be “doing something” to justify his reelection.

So it must be frustrating for all the Senators who desperately want to “do something” when colleagues in their own party insist on larding unpopular policies into bills that would otherwise sail through the process.  Though the main energy bill claims enough support to pass, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are blocking it because its centrist supporters refuse to include the Environmental Left’s demands for cap-and-trade.  When asked to present the cap-and-tax language as a stand-alone amendment, Kerry and Boxer balked because they don’t have the 60 votes to attach it.

Who can blame them?  After the large scale corruption of the legislative process to pass ObamaCare, why wouldn’t a Democratic lawmaker think that rules only apply to Republicans?

Happily, adding text to the United States Code isn’t everyone’s definition of a good legislator.  Senators like Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) pride themselves on reducing the word count of the nation’s legal regime.  Less law means less room for bureaucrats to expand their reach.  Let’s hope the Democrats’ insatiable demand for more government continues to be an obstacle to passing any new laws.

So, maybe the progressive elites currently running the federal government aren’t insane so much as handicapped.  A new study finds that people with a certain type of brain lesion are less inhibited to take extreme risks with money than those with brains functioning normally.

They studied two women with a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which damages the amygdala, the almond-shaped center in the brain that controls fear and certain other acute emotions.

The researchers compared the women’s responses to 12 people with undamaged brains. They noted this kind of study usually involves only a few people as it is not possible or ethical to deliberately damage a person’s brain to see what happens.

The volunteers were asked to make gambles in which there was an equal probability they would win $20 or lose $5 (a risk most people will take) — or would win or lose $20 (one most people will reject).

The two patients with damaged amygdalas fearlessly risked a $50 pot.

The researchers concluded that “this shows that the amygdale is critical for triggering a sense of caution toward making gambles in which you might lose.”  But how about those occasions when you know a certain decision will lose money?  Like, for example, intentionally proposing a $1.3 trillion budget deficit?  Or pushing a health care “reform” bill taxing citizens for years before it starts delivering care?  Or how about imposing an energy tax on carbon emissions with the primary effect being less economic output?

Thanks to this study, there is finally a rational explanation for such behavior: Democratic leaders may have brain lesions.  Whew!  Here I thought they were insane; turns out they’re just suffering from a diseased brain.

As Majority Leader Harry Reid scrambles to put together the pieces on his economy-busting health care “reform” bill, the Senate Finance Committee today began  hearings on that other job-killing legislation… Cap-and-Trade.

The Committee’s Ranking Member, Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), rightly used some of the time he had for opening remarks to remind his colleagues that unlike the Environment and Public Works Committee, which is controlled by some of the Senate’s most liberal members and which passed its version of a Cap-and-Trade energy tax last week, the Finance Committee’s job is to focus on the economic impact and costs of the legislation.

According to Roll Call, Grassley stated:

This committee’s expertise is in the costs and economic impacts of new taxes. It therefore has the relevant expertise for evaluating the costs associated with climate change legislation. An honest cost-benefit assessment requires that we first stop trying to sell this policy as if it will have no cost for Americans and accept the basic economic principle that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Acknowledging Grassley’s remarks, Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) said:

While we must always be mindful of the cost of legislation, that’s particularly true in today’s economy. Our unemployment rate remains far too high. And we must be diligent to create jobs, including in the energy sector.”

Considering the federal government’s own estimates warn that the legislation would cost the U.S. economy far more jobs than it may create, wouldn’t the most diligent thing be for Baucus to scrap the idea of a Cap-and-Trade energy tax altogether?

A new poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans are becoming less enthusiastic about capping greenhouse gas emissions.  According to the survey, only 35% say global warming is a very serious problem.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) commented, “Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll, aside from the precipitous drop in the number of Independents who believe global warming is a problem, is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade.”

Surprisingly, 55% of respondents said that they have heard “nothing at all” about cap-and-trade (legislation that would impose new energy taxes) proposals being debated in Congress.

For more info see here and here.

Call Congress at 202-224-3121 and urge your representatives to oppose new energy taxes.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, penned a great op-ed in Roll Call this week about the climate change legislation (aka Cap-and-Trade) being pushed by the Obama White House and the majority leadership in Congress.

No matter how many times Congress debates it, and no matter how environmentalists couch it, cap-and-trade will do virtually nothing to stop global warming, and cap-and-trade, as Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said, ‘is a tax, and a great big one.’ These are the fundamentals in the cap-and-trade debate…

We need to remind the American public, for example, that the 1,400-page Waxman-Markey monstrosity is a monument to big government that will make food, gasoline and electricity more expensive, increase mandates on small businesses, and increase the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy — all while doing nothing to affect climate change.

The Kerry-Boxer legislation introduced Sept. 30 is, in many ways, worse than the Waxman-Markey bill. This reflects the attitude of one of the bill’s sponsors, who said recently that, because of the recession, businesses should be expected to make even more expensive emissions reductions. While it’s never a good time to pass a national energy tax, one would have thought that imposing such a tax during a recession is especially bad.”

Read the full column here.

There is something distinctly undignified when a Nobel Prize-winning economist goes postal, but then no one has accused Paul Krugman of dignity in some time.

In one of his harangues on behalf of the Waxman-Markey bill (you know, otherwise known as cap-and-tax) to supposedly prevent some future tropical creature’s diet from including boiled people, Krugman makes the argument that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family “roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.”

Krugman did not originate the line, around a while now, one of those analogies invariably conjured up by elitists to explain to us plain folks in plain language why we can afford to fund this or that government program.

With regard to this one, we would never stoop so low as to ask what the Postal Service, yet another already bankrupt government service, will do when all those average families, who really must live within their budgets, have to sacrifice just that one postage stamp a day (and that’s if you accept Krugman’s and the government’s math).  Do Nobel Prize-winning economists ever address the idea that resources which are not infinite cannot be infinitely taken?

No, we want to be positive by urging President Obama to begin selling ObamaCare by saying it’s only going to cost every senior citizen just two-and-a-half Depends diapers a day.