Freedom Line Blog

On behalf of the 60 organizations listed below and the millions of Americans represented, we urge you to take action on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for Ozone and to reform the rulemaking process for ozone and other pollutants regulated under NAAQS. Without changes to the ozone regulation and reform of the rulemaking process, economic activity could be brought to a standstill in many areas across the country.

In this installment of the Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the massive toxic spill caused by the EPA in a Colorado river, the agency’s response to the disaster and the double standard by which business and the feds are held to account.

In an interview with CFIF, William Yeatman, Assistant Director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, discusses the Obama Administration’s climate agenda, its all-out war on coal, the Keystone Pipeline project and the EPA’s assault on state sovereignty.

Listen to the interview here.

CFIF has filed an official comment with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), opposing its attempt to impose a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that constitutes a destructive form of anti-trade protectionism by arbitrarily discriminating against palm oil-based biofuel on the basis of dubious scientific analysis.

While CFIF opposes federal RFS mandates generally, the EPA’s existing RFS palm oil decision amounts to trade protectionism with potentially toxic effects that the Agency must deliberate.  Not only does that decision violate America’s free trade commitments with the World Trade Organization (WTO), it will result in higher energy costs and fewer choices for American consumers.  “The policy deprives American energy consumers of a fuller range of choices in the energy market,” our comment observes, “and it privileges certain well-connected domestic producer groups, ultimately raising costs and limiting choices for all Americans.”  CFIF concludes, “It is also a hostile affront to longstanding American allies who have invested in plantation agriculture as a means of developing export markets to generate critical economic growth, thereby undermining U.S. support for greater global prosperity and poverty abatement. ”

Rather than position itself as some sort of gatekeeper of alternative energy sources, the EPA should instead institute policies that permit entrepreneurial market forces to respond to consumer demands and determine the ultimate contours and direction of the energy sector.  During a period of rising energy costs, this encroachment upon the individual freedoms of citizens and private businesses is unjustifiable and should be withdrawn.

In an interview with CFIF, Richard Trzupek, a chemist, consultant and writer who has worked in the environmental industry for decades, discusses his recently released Encounter Broadside titled, “How the EPA’s Green Tyranny is Stifling America.”

Listen to the interview here.

Since at least the FDR era, the Democratic Party has served as an umbrella for a motley coalition of special interest groups that have only one thing in common: demanding action from government.  Most of the time, the competing priorities of the groups don’t come into direct conflict.  But when they do, it is a delight to sit back and watch each carve up the other.

Today’s example comes from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Apparently, businesses in the energy sector aren’t the only ones fighting the Obama Administration’s job-killing EPA regulations.  Labor unions like the Utility Workers Union of America and the United Mine Workers are demanding a ceasefire on cap-it-or-close-it regulations that could force companies to close 18% of the nation’s coal factories if they fail to comply with the EPA’s proposed climate change rules.

Unions recognize that without factories workers get fired.  Environmentalists don’t want to budge on what the Natural Resources Defense Council calls “the biggest public health achievement” of the Obama Administration.

Simple math is likely to break the stalemate.  Unions in coal states account for millions of campaign contributions and thousands of votes.  With Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all flipping from Obama in 2008 to the Republicans in 2010, don’t count on the president to sacrifice his reelection chances on the altar of green jobs.

If he does, union voters – and their dollars – just might stay home in 2012.

The election of a Republican majority in the House was supposed to stop the power grabs that were so frequent in the last Congress. But instead, all they have done is moved them out of reach of the voters. In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how liberals are now trying to advance their agenda through the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy.

The most toxic substance floating around Louisiana’s coastline isn’t oil – it’s the confusion that comes with the federal government’s alphabet soup of bureaucracy.  Click on any article describing the feds’ response, and you get a myriad of people and institutions allegedly “in charge” of directing the cleanup activity.  So far, the heads of the EPA, Interior Department, Homeland Security, and Coast Guard have all visited the state and personally weighed in on what should be done.  Now, they are contradicting each other.

In a news conference on Sunday outside the BP headquarters in Houston, Mr. Salazar repeated the phrase that the government would keep its “boot on BP’s neck” for results. He also said the company had repeatedly missed deadlines and had not been open with the public.

Mr. Salazar added, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately.”

That statement, however, conflicted with comments made only hours earlier by the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad W. Allen, who said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the access BP has to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.

“They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved,” he said.

One of the consequences of bloated bureaucracies is overlapping areas of responsibility.  Coupled with a politician’s aversion to risk (an element of bold decision making), and the result is many people responsible, but no one is ultimately in charge.

And while they dither, 65 miles of Louisiana coastline are “oiled.”

The University of East Anglia is a taxpayer-supported university whose Climate Research Unit (CRU) has produced data serving as the basis for international studies alleging a global warming crisis.  That includes our own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has proposed draconian, unnecessary and costly regulation of carbon dioxide. But in August of this year, the CRU admitted that it destroyed the original raw data for its global surface temperature set, claiming a lack of storage space.

In other words, the dog ate its homework?

Unfortunately, but conveniently for global warming alarmists, the EPA stopped accepting public comments on its proposed carbon dioxide regulation back in June.  But fortunately, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a petition with the EPA yesterday to re-open debate.  As stated by CEI’s General Counsel Sam Kazman, “the EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data.  But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable.  If the EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”

Dennis the Menace couldn’t get away with this excuse, and neither should the CRU or EPA bureaucrats.