Memo To House GOP: Get A Grip On The EPA

Getting a grip on the Environmental Protection Agency must be at the top of the upcoming Republican-controlled House’s “To Do” list.

Of immediate concern are the EPA rules for regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Unless stopped by a federal court, the Obama EPA will implement on Jan. 2 a flagrantly illegal scheme to regulate emissions from power plants and other large emitters. This enactment will kill jobs and raise the prices of energy, and thus of all good and services.

The Obama administration originally designed the scheme as a regulatory sword of Damocles to pressure Congress and industry into agreeing on a cap-and-trade framework.

But cap-and-trade reached its high-water mark in June 2009 when the House barely passed the controversial Waxman-Markey bill. Cap-and-trade’s prospects then deteriorated quite rapidly, placing the Obama administration in the position of having to make good on its threat to unleash the EPA’s carbon dogs on America.

The Obama EPA bootstrapped itself into the carbon regulation business with its December 2009 “endangerment finding,” decreeing that GHG emissions threaten the public welfare. The EPA based its finding on a 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a report that, while always controversial, came under even more fire as a result of the November 2009 Climategate scandal.

Already on shaky legal ground, the EPA ventured clearly into law-breaking territory with its June 2010 “tailoring rule.” Under the Clean Air Act, if the EPA regulates a “pollutant,” it must regulate all sources that emit as little as 100 tons per year.

Implementing this requirement for GHGs would put the EPA in the impossible position of having to regulate virtually every small business and multi-family residential complex—a total of more than 6.1 million sources nationwide. The EPA estimated it would require 1.4 billion work hours costing $63 billion over three years to accomplish that task.    
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