MORE MISCHIEF FROM THE EPA- FIRST TARGET COAL, THEN ALL FOSSIL FUELS SEE NOTE PLEASE
http://online.wsj.com/articles/highway-to-the-danger-ozone-1417122149
RAEL ISAAC EXPOSES THE REAL AGENDA OF THE CLIMATEERS AND PSEUDO ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN A SHORT, CONCISE BOOK…READ IT!
Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (new, revised…Oct 15, 2013
Highway to the Danger Ozone As Obama rewrites the law, Congress and the courts begin to push back.
The afterparty of President Obama ’s immigration rewrite is a year-end blowout of anticarbon regulation that is also contemptuous of the rule of law and democratic consent. The better development is that the two other branches of government aren’t amused by the festivities and may impose some accountability for the damage.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the Environmental Protection Agency released a 626-page proposal (plus a 575-page appendix) to regulate ozone. Like so many other such rules, this one twists decades-old air pollution laws to restructure the U.S. energy industry and gradually ban fossil-fuel-fired power. Coal is the first target but natural gas is next.
The ozone rule requires power plants, heavy manufacturers and agriculture operations to limit smog in ground-level ambient air. About a third of the country is out of compliance with the current standard of 75 parts-per-billion, and the EPA wants to take it to 65 ppb. The agency is also taking comments on a 60 ppb standard that would leave 95% of the country out of compliance.
This entirely discretionary rule could cost as much as $17 billion a year in return for ever-more-minuscule gains in public health—by the agency’s own calculation. Footnote: EPA estimates are always wrong by at least an order of magnitude.
This ozone ploy is especially notable because the EPA first attempted to impose it in 2011. Mr. Obama’s former regulatory chaperone Cass Sunstein prevailed on his boss ahead of the election to yank the rule, in the name of jobs and business investment. With his re-election behind him, Mr. Obama has reverted to go-for-broke green politics.
If the White House climateers are making up for lost time, and then some, they are ignoring warnings from the Supreme Court to, well, obey the law. On Tuesday the Justices agreed to hear a challenge to a separate EPA rule, which nominally limits mercury emissions but is intended as another cartridge in the anticarbon chamber.
The case involves a technical question about costs and benefits and whether the EPA is required to conduct such analyses. The EPA says it needn’t do so and selectively cites statutes in support. But the Court’s decision to take the case is unusual because it nearly always defers to agencies to interpret laws, and the mercury rule was upheld 2-1 by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in April.
The decision to hear the new case follows the High Court’s warning last term in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA that all the President’s men aren’t allowed to rewrite laws. “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 majority observed, adding that it is “patently unreasonable—not to say outrageous—for EPA to insist on seizing expansive power that it admits the statute is not designed to grant.”
Message not received. If the Supremes conclude a second rebuke is necessary and strike down the mercury rule as illegal, the judiciary will be doing its job to vindicate the separation of powers when the executive branch trespasses.
Utility Air Regulatory Group vacated greenhouse gas measures that were meant to apply to new power plants, but the EPA is also putting the finishing touches on new limits on CO2 emissions for existing plants. This “clean power plan” is the core of the anticarbon putsch and will be finalized in January.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Puitt is leading opposition among 17 state AGs and readying another legal challenge if the EPA plows ahead as planned. The agency is using an obscure clause in the Clean Air Act of 1970 known as Section 111(d) to transform U.S. energy policy, though these vague several hundred words have only been applied five times in history to minor problems like particles from pulp mills or municipal landfill gas.
Mr. Pruitt et al. make a convincing case that the clean power plan usurps the traditional state authority to police pollution. Congress can federalize energy policy, but it must do so explicitly. The EPA certainly can’t conjure pre-emption and use Section 111(d) as a general license to supervise the Earth’s atmosphere and U.S. economy. In any case—again by the EPA’s own estimate—the plan would reduce atmospheric CO2 by less than 1% and prevent a sea level rise of less than one-thousandth of an inch.
Incoming Republican Energy Committee chairs Lisa Murkowski in the Senate and Fred Upton in the House are leading the charge against such EPA overreach, and one tool that deserves a workout next year is the Congressional Review Act. This useful law lets Congress overrule federal regulations with a simple majority vote. Mr. Obama may veto such bills, but at least he’d have to defend rewriting laws in defiance of a bipartisan majority and voters who favor lower energy costs.
Part of the miracle of the Constitution’s checks and balances is that they’re durable enough to withstand even a President as willful as Mr. Obama. The counteroffensive is now underway.
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