Free Republic

A week before The EPA disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, this letter to the editor was published in The Silverton Standard & The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist detailing verbatim, how EPA would foul the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money...

Here’s today’s political quiz question: what do these five states — Rhode Island, Vermont, California, Oregon and Maine — have in common. Yes they are blue states ruled by Democrats, but that’s not all. These are the states that use the least amount of coal — less than 2 percent — for electric power. In fact, almost all of the states that are politically liberal and vote unfailingly Democratic are low coal use states. Washington, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are also in the top 10 states least reliant on coal. Only conservative Idaho is a red state with...

Gov. John Hickenlooper has pledged that Colorado will comply with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, but this effort to cut so-called “CO2 pollution” could come at a dear price to the state’s coal industry. ... Colorado is among the top states in coal production and consumption. In the year 2013, 64 percent of energy produced in Colorado came from coal, 20 percent from natural gas, and around 15 percent from various renewables including hydroelectric, biomass, solar and wind. The history of Colorado’s coal mining industry stretches over the past two centuries. Not to mention, coal jobs have a multiplier effect...

How often do we see sad stories such as this in the news? Evil industrialists carelessly create a swath of damage across our pristine natural resources through pollution and reckless destruction. Another such event took place in Colorado this week when millions of gallons of toxic, metal laden waste water were dumped into a local stream, feeding into the local river system used by swimmers and fishermen. And the culprit for this horrendous act was… the Environmental Protection Agency. A team of U.S. regulators probing contamination at a Colorado gold mine accidentally released a million gallons (3.8 million liters)...

This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without...

When candidate Barack Obama boasted back in 2008 that his radical climate change policies would "bankrupt" coal-fired power plants, he was for once telling the wretched truth. On Monday Mr. Obama accelerated the timetable in his war on coal, with new EPA regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. The White House openly admits that the goal is to use much less coal and force utilities to consume far costlier and less reliable "renewable" electric power. Whether these feel-good regulations imposed on America's domestic industries will impact global carbon emissions and climate...

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said there is no need to continue debating the science behind climate change. “I can remember a day when the weather report was in the middle of the domestic and international news and took about a minute and a half. It wasn’t the news. When you go on the news today the first thing you’ll hear about is the weather. So there is a dramatic difference in the way people perceive the ability of the climate to impact their lives because they’re feeling it today,” McCarthy said during an event sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor....

As President Obama prepares to complete sweeping regulations aimed at tackling climate change, at least five Republican governors, including two presidential hopefuls, say they may refuse to carry out the rules in their states. The resistance threatens to ignite a fierce clash between federal and state authorities, miring the climate rules in red tape for years. The fight could also undermine Mr. Obama’s efforts to urge other nations to enact similar plans this year as part of a major United Nations climate change accord. Republican strategists say that rejection of Mr. Obama’s climate policy at the state level could emerge...

Attorneys general from thirteen states filed a lawsuit Monday challenging EPA's new rule defining the waters of the U.S. (WOTUS), asserting that the rule expands the scope of clean water regulations to lands that are dry much of the year and increases the federal government's authority over land use. The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota. South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley, who joined in the lawsuit, noted that 35 states have filed comments in opposition to the rule and several other attorneys general are considering filing challenges. The EPA is overstepping...

A prominent left-wing group helped formulate Environmental Protection Agency talking points designed to sell a controversial regulatory scheme to skeptical journalists, internal emails show. The emails show Joseph Goffman, the senior counsel of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, circulating talking points from Center for American Progress climate strategy director Daniel Weiss among EPA colleagues attempting to sell the agency's controversial power plant regulations to a New York Times reporter. Weiss emailed Goffman in September 2013 with a series of suggestions for convincing the Times' Matt Wald of the commercial viability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, a vital...

The Supreme Court has ruled against federal regulators’ attempt to limit power plant emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants. The rules began to take effect in April, but the court said by a 5-4 vote Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to take their cost into account when the agency first decided to regulate the toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired plants.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against Environmental Protection Agency pollution rules for power plants Monday, in a blow to President Obama's environmental agenda. The EPA rules in question regulate hazardous air pollutants and mercury from coal- and oil-fired power plants, known as the MATS regulations. The regulations went into effect April 16. The utility industry argues that the rules cost them billions of dollars to comply and that EPA ignored the cost issue in putting the regulations into effect. Many of the companies have either made the investments or closed power plants to comply. If the investments necessary to upgrade...

With the Obama administration only two months away from releasing its “Clean Power Plan,” much debate has focused on the supposed benefits of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over the next 15 years. Lost amid the rhetoric is the economic hardship it will impose on working families — especially the 2.2 million blacks and Hispanics living in Pennsylvania. That's the finding from a new study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce. This regulation will leave minority communities with disproportionately fewer jobs, lower incomes and higher poverty than whites. Thus, while the administration calls its regulation a “justice issue”...

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told an audience Tuesday gathered at a White House conference “normal people,” not “climate deniers” will win the debate on global warming.rWhat do you think? McCarthy’s remarks came as she was talking about the reasons why the EPA put out a report on the negative health impacts global warming will have on public health. She said the agency puts out such reports to educate the public, not answer critiques from global warming skeptics.rWhat do you think?

An injunction issued against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by federal judge Leigh Martin May could spell the beginning of the end for Administrative Law Courts and with them, 80 years of unconstitutional abuse of power by the Executive branch. Administrative Law “…allows for the creation of public regulatory agencies and contains all of the statutes, judicial decisions, and regulations that govern them.” These regulatory bodies include the EPA and the SEC. Many came into being during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt, the one president more arrogant and power hungry than Barack Obama. The law itself “…is created by...

The government is proposing to regulate aircraft emissions in much the same way as power plants, saying they are a threat to human health because they contain pollutants that help cause global warming and therefore should be regulated. The Environmental Protection Agency announcement Wednesday clears the way for possible U.S. adoption of international emissions standards, which are expected to be released next year. U.S. regulations wouldn't apply to small piston-engine planes or military aircraft. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, has been working for several years on developing global aircraft emissions standards for the first time.

After already socking the public, business and the economy with costly regulations, President Obama added another $110 billion in the last half year and is rushing to finish his second term with even more costly environmental rules, according to a taxpayer watchdog."The administration's time in office is coming to a close, so regulators will surely rush to finish its greenhouse gas and ozone standards before the next administration takes power," warned American Action Forum in a new analysis of the administration's latest report of new regulations.Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the Forum, studied the twice-yearly released list of...

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....

‘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...

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....