Free Republic

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon pollution, contains an antipoverty transfer program to help offset the harm it does to the poor, a Wall Street Journal editorial explained.According to WSJ, the EPA has stated that they are concerned about low-income communities and wants to ensure that they benefit from the implementation of their regulations.“At the federal level, the EPA is creating a program that gives twice as large a subsidy for renewable and efficiency projects that are built in inner-city neighborhoods and disadvantaged rural areas,” states the article. “There will be job retraining...

U.S. households are saving hundreds of dollars a year because natural gas prices are low, but that’s about to change. Astudy by NERA Economic Consulting has found new regulations on power plants mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) will increase natural gas prices to 2007 levels, virtually guaranteeing these savings will soon be wiped out. A study by the Brookings Institution found natural gas prices have plummeted as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, also known as horizontal “fracking,” has caused U.S. natural gas production to skyrocket to all-time highs, making the United States the world’s top producer of...

Global Warming: When it comes to climate change, President Obama says we're all in it together. But when it comes to his plan to fight it, some states appear to be more equal than others.

“Providing false or misleading testimony to Congress is a serious matter,” House Republicans wrote to McCarthy, accusing her of making false statements regarding EPA regulations and science.

Dave Taylor, the retired geologist who predicted the EPA project that caused the 3 million gallon toxic spill into the Animas River in Colorado would fail, tells Breitbart News, “I didn’t really know they were going to fool with the Gold King mine in addition to the Red and Bonita mine.”In a July 30 letter to the editor of the Silverton Standard, Taylor predicted that the EPA project to plug the Red and Bonita mine would fail “within 7 to 120 days,” and the 500 gallons per minute flow of toxic waste from those mines which the project stopped temporarily...

Fenton, Mo., company was tasked with mitigating pollutants from closed mine. Missouri-based Environmental Restoration LLC was the contractor whose work caused a mine spill in Colorado that released an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a major river system ... The EPA, which was overseeing the servicing of the mine, had previously said an unnamed outside contractor was using heavy equipment when it accidentally triggered a breach in the abandoned Gold King Mine, letting out wastewater that had built up inside it. “Environmental Restoration LLC was working at the direction at EPA ... Environmental Restoration is one of...

Last Wednesday, a small EPA-supervised work crew inspecting the Gold King mine accidentally knocked a hole in a waste pit, releasing at least three million gallons of acidic liquid laden with toxic heavy metals. (ABC) This letter to editor, posted below, was published in The Silverton Standard and The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist, one week before EPA mine spill. The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. It the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development...

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”...