Free Republic

Can you imagine telling the IRS you don’t need to complete all their forms or provide records to back up your claim for a tax refund? Or saying your company’s assurances that its medical products are safe and effective should satisfy the FDA? Especially if some of your data don’t actually support your claims—or you “can’t find” key data, research and other records, because your hard drive conveniently crashed? But, you tell them, people you paid to review your information said it’s accurate, so there’s no problem. Do you suppose the government would accept your assurance that there’s “not a...

The Obama administration is poised to rescind a little-known emissions exemption for power plants as it seeks to address climate change. Green groups are pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to finalize a rule that would force utilities to limit emissions when power plants are shutting down, starting up or malfunctioning. Those emissions had previously been exempted from regulations because they were not considered a part of “normal operations,” but the EPA says that policy is now “outdated.” The environmental group Sierra Club held rallies last week near two facilities that would be affected by the end of the exemption and...

The Environmental Protection Agency is getting taken to court left and right for their many overzealous regulations and intrusions into private industry, with varying results– but on Friday, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that, why no, the EPA may not punish the oil industry for their noncompliance with the EPA’s lofty Renewable Fuels Standard mandates in failing to blend a certain amount of cellulosic biofuels into their product, seeing as how those biofuels are not actually available.

Two coal companies in Pennsylvania blamed President Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the layoffs announced last week. “[T]he escalating costs and uncertainty generated by recently advanced EPA regulations and interpretations have created a challenging business climate for the entire coal industry,” said PBS Coals Inc. President and CEO D. Lynn Shanks in a statement on Friday, as noted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The company also cited weaker-than-normal demand for coal. Shanks’ comment on the EPA came as he announced a 28 percent work force reduction. “PBS Coals Inc. and its affiliate company, RoxCoal Inc., laid off about...

Gleick’s grants from EPA get Stalinized from the EPA Grants Database.Here’s the timeline: Yesterday at 11:41 am we reported that EPA has awarded Peter Glieck’s Pacific Institute $468,000 in grants. Later in the afternoon, the National Center for Public Policy Research issued a media release calling for Congressional hearings into the EPA grants to Gleick. Today, a JunkScience.com commenter Brian Carter reported that the links in our original post didn’t work. We confirmed Carter’s observation around 12:30pm today. Fortunately, we saved a PDF file of one of the EPA grants to Gleick. So unless JunkScience.com gets Stalinized…Click for: The EPA...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming. Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of total U.S. emissions. According to an Associated Press analysis of the data, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in...