This week the EPA celebrates its 40th birthday. In honor of the occasion, they’ve launched a dedicated website called EPA@40, and it’s head, Lisa Jackson, will take off on a week-long party circuit designed to “highlight the impact of [the EPA’s] efforts to clean up the air Americans breathe and the water they drink and the communities they live in” as well as her agency’s crusade to attend to “the unfinished business of the environmental movement.”
What started as a way to help the government respond to environmental disasters and spread conservation awareness, however, has metastasized into a bloated, over-reaching disaster of it’s own, championing extensive governmental intervention, curbing freedoms and, most recently, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, all in the name of preserving the environment.
In the midst of an economic downturn, the EPA will once again retool it’s famous, founding Clean Air Act, rewriting the historical legislation to suit Obama’s own bureaucratic needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, it’ll have a devastating effect on the private sector:
Achieving that level of reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be easy or cheap. This immense new burden on the private sector comes at precisely the wrong time for an economy still struggling to create new jobs and reduce near double-digit unemployment…The cost estimates are indeed staggering, according to an econometric study by the Manufacturers Alliance that projects more than 7.3 million lost jobs by 2020. The hardest-hit states include Texas, which would lose 1.7 million jobs, and Louisiana, with 938,000 positions lost. Others include California (846,000), Illinois (396,000) and Pennsylvania (351,000). Total losses would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.”
Of course, these new standards wouldn’t just affect isolated industries or particular states.
The cost of energy and production would increase across the board, raising the prices of goods.
And that’s only one instance. Under Lisa Jackson’s watchful eye, the EPA has taken arbitrary action after arbitrary action. Last month, an EPA official urged his agency to revoke an already-approved permit for America’s largest mountain-top coal mine, after the permit had already been given and after a three-year process where the mine’s administrators repeatedly caved to changing EPA demands.
But, of course, coal has always been the enemy of the EPA, no matter how clean the energy production gets – and mountaintop mining is an incredibly clean form of energy production. It’s how the EPA has started treating everyone else that’s causing real problems. With Cap-and-Trade on the chopping block, the EPA and the Obama Administration are working together to find ways to punish industries with climate change legislation.
But, as President Barack Obama commented, there is more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to climate change legislation. He and Reid know the failure of cap and trade in Congress is immaterial.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency already have revealed plans to use the their statutory power to enforce greenhouse gas limits, perhaps harsher than those in the cap-and-trade bill. That would be devastating…
The new “tailoring rule” on greenhouse gases – which caps greenhouse gas emissions on what the EPA belives are the “worst” polluters – will affect thousands of jobs nationwide. One study concluded that the EPA’s decision to enforce caps on greenhouse gasses without the approval of Congress will cost nearly one million jobs. The new regulations are threatening to put entire industries out of business, industries like biomass production, refusing to carve out exceptions to greenhouse gas emissions standards, what most consider to be a carbon-neutral form of energy production, and potentially costing thousands of jobs in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest.
So while the EPA takes a victory lap in honor of it’s 40th birthday, they’ll be giving the birthday gift to Americans – an economy that refuses to recover, nearly a million lost jobs, brand new government regulations, and dying industries all in the name of environmental protection.