Free Republic

EPA has abandoned its duty of protecting American citizens from health hazards introduced into the environment to that of protecting the environment from American citizens' good health and welfare Some twenty states, power utilities and mining industries, having taken the hard-nosed measure of suing the EPA for destroying business, grip the edge of their seats anticipating three decisions from the Supreme Court this month. That there is need to bring suit against governmental agencies for damage incurred by overbearing regulation is wrong in itself, but the role reversal these cases exemplify is the true travesty. America has turned so upside-down...

Rules: The day before Memorial Day, the Obama administration released its list of regulations in the pipeline for the next year. Given the price tag involved, it's no surprise that they didn't want anyone to notice it.

Next time there is a knock at the front door, it just might be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency waiting to deliver a message. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy dealt a warning Wednesday to Americans who do not place environmental stewardship above everything else. "If you are selling to somebody a product, and you can assure them that that product was produced in the most environmentally responsible way, I will guarantee you that they will value that product more highly," McCarthy said at the 2015 GreenGov symposium at George Washington University in Washington. "I can guarantee you because if...

Congressional Republicans are pushing to block an Obama administration rule designed to protect water quality in small streams, tributaries and wetlands before it goes into effect later this year. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved legislation Wednesday that would force the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to withdraw and rewrite rules issued in May that clarify which of those smaller bodies of water are regulated under the Clean Water Act. The EPA says the rule will protect the waters from pollution and development and safeguard drinking water for 117 million Americans. Republicans in...

The Obama administration wants to declare that greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are harmful, which would set up regulations to limit the pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed “endangerment finding” Wednesday, which would formally conclude that carbon dioxide and any other greenhouse gases from commercial airplanes contribute to climate change and harm the public health and welfare. The move is a major win for environmentalists, since aircraft are the largest source of greenhouse gases that the EPA is not either regulating or planning to regulate. But the EPA’s proposed solution to the airplane climate problem — adopting...

The Environmental Protection Agency launched a new online tool today that can show you if environmental justice in your neighborhood is out of whack. It’s called EJSCREEN, “an environmental justice screening and mapping tool that uses high resolution maps combined with demographic and environmental data to identify places with potentially elevated environmental burdens and vulnerable populations,” according to the agency. “EJSCREEN’s simple to understand color-coded maps, bar charts, and reports enable users to better understand areas in need of increased environmental protection, health care access, housing, infrastructure improvement, community revitalization, and climate resilience.”

A Senate committee voted along party lines Wednesday to overturn the Obama administration’s new regulation asserting control over small waterways like streams and wetlands. The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), would repeal the waters of the United States rule, also known as the clean water rule, and give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specific guidelines to re-write it in a way that Republicans find more acceptable. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed the bill by a vote of 11-9, with only Republicans supporting it. Republicans complained that the rule released late last month by the EPA...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said greenhouse gases from aircraft endanger human health, taking the first step toward regulating emissions from the domestic aviation industry. The EPA's endangerment finding kicks off a process to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation industry, the latest sector to be regulated under the Clean Air Act after cars, trucks and large stationary sources like power plants.

In a major victory for the Obama administration, a panel of federal judges has blocked a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency's planned efforts to limit carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Tuesday's ruling does not prevent future legal challenges against the rules but states that a challenge before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit came too early, as EPA has not yet finalized its climate rule. That action is expected later this summer. The case, brought by coal company Murray Energy and a coalition of states led by West Virginia, was an early skirmish in the high-stakes...

Scientific reality: PM2.5 does not kill anyone. The EPA's claims of PM2.5 lethality rank among the most nonsensical fraudulent and readily disprovable scientific claims ever. Chinese cities have some of the worst air pollution in the world. Two are Xi’an and Shanghai. Yet reports claim life expectancy in both these cities is higher than the US. According to a 2012 report, even though the air in Xi’an is, on average, 9-10 times more polluted in terms of PM2.5 particles than the median PM2.5 levels of the two most polluted cities in a 112 US city study (Rubidoux, CA and Los...

Since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 3,373 new final regulations, equaling 29,770 pages in the Federal Register and totaling approximately 29,770,000 words, according to a count of the regulations published in the Federal Register. The Gutenberg Bible is only 1,282 pages and 646,128 words. This means the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration contain 23 times as many pages as the Bible and 46 times as many words. The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules....

Josh Fox, creator of the “Gasland” films, has been playing up on Twitter that he got kicked off the Fox Business show Varney & Co. after a heated debate with the show’s host on the EPA’s hydraulic fracturing report. Fox and his supporters claimed he was kicked off the Fox show for schooling its host Stuart Varney in a fracking debate. Fox claims Varney kicked him off the show after being “confronted with the truth on fracking.” But Fox’s claim of being kicked off Fox Business for beating them down with facts is very far from the truth. The Daily...

There has not been this kind of palace intrigue at the Vatican since the 1500s. Foreign potentates are making a power grab, trying to seize the moral authority of the papacy for their own, secular ends. Like modern-day courtiers, lay and clerical aides to Pope Francis are slyly assisting these foreign princes from the United Nations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and other such non-friends of Catholicism. In public comments, for months, officials such as Jeffrey Sachs and Ban Ki Moon from the UN, and lay leaders such as Margaret Archer at the Vatican, have been telling the public the...

‘Flexibility” is the advertised hallmark of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which by 2030 would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 30% from 2005 levels. The central feature of the plan is a forced shift away from inexpensive coal-fired power. Not to worry, says EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: “With EPA’s flexible proposal, states choose the ways we cut carbon pollution, so we can still have affordable, reliable power to grow our economy.” Under the plan, the EPA will set a carbon-dioxide-emissions target for every state, and give each state roughly a year to develop and...

After years of unfounded hysteria from so-called environmentalists, the media and Hollywood that fracking causes drinking water contamination, the Environmental Protection Agency just issued a major blow to anti-fracking activists. A new report from the EPA, based on a study sanctioned by Congress, shows drinking water contamination only results if fracking wells aren't built or maintained properly, which is a rarity. "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms...

ABC and NBC sustained their refusal on Friday morning to cover a new report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that found oil and natural gas fracking does not cause harm to the country’s drinking water. After all three networks omitted any mention of the study on their Thursday evening newscasts, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today continued that pattern while CBS This Morning broke through and provided a new brief on the topic.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s long-awaited report on fracking dismayed liberal green groups Thursday while pleasing the oil and gas industry — the latest episode in both sides’ fraught relationship with President Barack Obama. The study, more than four years in the making, said the EPA has found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution from hydraulic fracturing. That conclusion dramatically runs afoul of one of the great green crusades of the past half-decade, which has portrayed the oil- and gas-extraction technique as a creator of fouled drinking water wells and flame-shooting faucets. The report also jibes with Obama’s global...

The Environmental Protection Agency has finished a draft copy of a long awaited study on fracking and its impact (or lack thereof) on drinking water. The folks in the green energy community who have been pushing for bans on the practice for years now are up in arms already because the results were precisely what they didn’t want to hear. The alarmist have been pedaling bogus science for quite a while now. The Environmental Protection Agency’s long-awaited report on fracking dismayed liberal green groups Thursday while pleasing the oil and gas industry — the latest episode in both sides’...

Want to see a perfect example of spin as a Washington art form? Read the results of the federal government's most in-depth investigation ever of fracking.

But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts. An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA....