Free Republic

For thousands of years, man has sought to ward off the dark by using light to illuminate the night. Now, EPA chief Gina McCarthy and celebrity astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson want to take us back a few thousand years by giving the agency the ability to deal with "light pollution." The only way to deal with light pollution is to, well, turn off the lights. This will be a boon to astronomers like Tyson who will be able to see the stars and planets a lot better. But for the rest of us, not so good. Crime will rise, accidents...

The EPA has been hit with a veritable flood of scandals recently. We covered the Animas River spill, caused by the EPA's rush to solve a non-problem involving a mine's wastewater, which impacted the water quality for several Western states. Now, one climate change expert who posed as a CIA operative has been jailed for conning the agency out of nearly $1 Million.

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - U.S. taxpayers could be left with multibillion-dollar liabilities if large coal companies are pushed to bankruptcy, the Interior Department Secretary said on Wednesday. At issue is a practice known as self-bonding, allowed under a decades-old mining program, in which some of the country's biggest coal companies forego insurance on a portion of future mine cleanup costs.

Todd Hennis claims EPA planned mine spill to usher in Superfund. the Environmental Protection Agency-contracted crew's triggered blowout on his property, effectively turning the Animas River into an orange spectacle. He was speechless and horrified, but not surprised ... I have been trying to make everybody aware of the dangers posed by the Sunnyside Mine pool for 14 years .. when I saw the pictures, I just felt my life was over. I just thought, Oh God, what did they do? ... Hennis, for his part, has long maintained increased flows from the Gold King Mine are a result of...

Environmental Protection Agency officials require contractors to sign secrecy pledges that in the case of the Gold King Mine spill kept the public in the dark earlier this year about a Colorado mining disaster that turned waters yellow as they flowed through two states and the Navajo Nation. ... these secrecy clauses are typical with the EPA - the same government agency whose former administrator, Lisa Jackson, used an alias email address to avoid public scrutiny. ... the EPA controls the flow of information by circumventing federal regulations that dictate when an agency can use non-disclosure clauses by including secrecy...

The Environmental Protection Agency is working to block a deposition for administrator Gina McCarthy as part of a coal industry lawsuit. In a Tuesday court filing, the EPA asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to block a scheduled deposition in a case brought against the agency by coal giant Murray Energy Corp. Murray has sued the EPA over its rules agenda, arguing that the agency doesn't properly consider the job impact of its regulations before issuing them. It has petitioned to have McCarthy deposed in the case, something scheduled for later this month. The EPA has...

The last several months have been bad ones for the Environmental Protection Agency. On August 5, EPA employees blundered into creating one of the worst toxic spills in American history when they allowed three million gallons of wastewater to flow into the Animas River in Colorado. The spill occurred during an attempted cleanup of an abandoned mine, despite warnings that their activity was creating the likelihood of a "blowout." But EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy did offer that she was "absolutely, deeply sorry this ever happened." Later in the same month, a federal court ruled that its proposed "waters of the...

While everyone was voting in Colorado elections Tuesday, scant attention was paid to how our U.S. Senators voted on a measure that is extremely important to our entire way of life. We'll give you a hint - it's water. A bill by our Wyoming neighbor, Republican U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, would have required the EPA to rewrite the egregious Waters of the United States rule to give states and the agriculture industry more protection. WOTUS, as it's known, is the latest and worstest regulation issued by the Obama administration to regulate ponds and ditches in neighborhoods and farms as navigable...

You’re not supposed to burn any coal or oil. You should probably avoid natural gas too, since it’s composed of hydrocarbons. Don’t drive your car unless it’s one of those battery powered ones that hasn’t caught fire yet. Get rid of those incandescent light bulbs all over your house. Clean all the steak and ground beef out of your fridge because cows are too flatulent. Have you checked all of these off your list? Good. Then you are finally doing your part and helping to end global warming.Oh, we forgot one more thing… we’re going to need to confiscate...

The legal barrage to halt the Environmental Protection Agency’s radical Clean Power Plan has begun. A broad coalition of U.S. industry and business, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and an armada of other business and industry organizations, has asked the D.C. District of the federal Court of Appeals to prevent any further action on the Plan until the court can decide its overall legal status. The coalition filed a motion at their first opportunity on Friday to stay EPA’s long-awaited final rule governing the plan, immediately after the agency published the rule in the...

On September 24, 2015, the federal Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) published a Notice of Proposed Withdrawal (“BLM notice”), proposing to withdraw from mineral location and entry federal lands identified as “sagebrush focal areas” in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The BLM notice commences a two-year temporary segregation period, prohibiting location and entry of new mining claims on BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands in these sagebrush focal areas. If the BLM decides to withdraw the area at the end of the segregation period, the withdrawal will last up to 20 years, but could be extended in the...

It's a regulation considered the most ambitious expansion of EPA's control over American waterways in history and a federal court has issued an injunction blocking its implementation. The Hill: “We conclude that petitioners have demonstrated a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims,” the judges wrote in their decision, explaining that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new guidelines for determining whether water is subject to federal control — based mostly on the water’s distance and connection to larger water bodies — is “at odds” with a key Supreme Court ruling.

The Environmental Protection Agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on military-style weapons to arm its 200 “special agents” to fight environmental crime. Among the weapons purchased are guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities, according to a new report by the watchdog group Open the Books. “Protecting the environment just got real. With millions of dollars spent on military style weaponry, the EPA is now literally ensconced with all institutional force,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Open the Books and the author...

OK, here’s the background. Once upon a time, the Obama administration decided to implement a ruling – without the input of Congress, mind you – that defined ““waters of the U.S.” to include virtually any wet area — even a rain-fed temporary pool — that is close to any other body of water with a physical connection to a navigable waterway.” As you can imagine, this was and is a massive attempt to extend the reach of the regulatory State into areas that they do not traditionally have the ability to go into. By making essentially all waters federal waters,...

A federal court ruled Friday that President Obama’s regulation to protect small waterways from pollution cannot be enforced nationwide. In a 2-1 ruling, the Cincinnati-based Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit delivered a stinging defeat to Obama’s most ambitious effort to keep streams and wetlands clean, saying it looks likely that the rule, dubbed Waters of the United States, is illegal. “We conclude that petitioners have demonstrated a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims,” the judges wrote in their decision, explaining that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new guidelines for determining whether water is subject...

New rules could outlaw lawn mowing, add a parking tax and declare national parks "toxic." Image via Shutterstock Next month, the Obama administration may roll out the most expensive regulation in history, ignoring scientific data that cutting ozone rates will not improve public health. In the name of fighting asthma, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requested permission to decrease the ozone standard — the amount of ozone allowed in the atmosphere — to a level some scientists say is physically impossible to achieve. One organization estimates the cost to implement these new rules will be $1.1 trillion. Even worse, data...

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials refused for weeks to share water-quality data with their state counterparts following a blowout of toxic wastewater from a Colorado mine that fouled rivers across the Southwest, New Mexico's top environmental regulator testified Thursday. The move by federal agencies aimed to downplay the severity of the spill, hobbling the state's response to the high levels of arsenic, lead and other contaminants involved in the spill, New Mexico Secretary of Environment Ryan Flynn said. His criticisms, aired before a U.S. House committee investigating the Aug. 5 accident, offered more fodder for congressional Republicans eager to find...

The recent Gold King Mine wastewater spill could breathe new life into a conversation about state control over federal lands. A meeting of the Water Resources Review Committee on Tuesday offered a glimpse into the issue, as state lawmakers had their first opportunity since the Aug. 5 spill to ask questions as an official panel. An Environmental Protection Agency-contracted team was performing reclamation work on the Gold King Mine near Silverton when an error during excavation caused an estimated 3 million gallons of orange sludge to pour into the Animas River. The water initially tested for spikes in heavy metals....

The Environmental Protection Agency was accused Wednesday of doctoring footage from the Gold King Mine spill, removing the audio of a worker saying, “What do we do now?” During a House committee hearing on the accident, Rep. Bill Johnson, Ohio Republican, showed what he said was an original on-site video taken the day of the Aug. 5 spill, which includes the audio, and then the same video posted on the EPA’s website that beeps out the audio. “The last few seconds of the audio has been removed to prevent the viewers from hearing the team on the ground saying, ‘What...

A Colorado coal mine slated for closure due to a technicality has gotten a reprieve from the federal government in a move that could save hundreds of jobs. The Colowyo coal mine, which has provided hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars to the economy of the city of Craig and the northwestern region of the state since 1977 was in danger of being closed because a renewal permit drafted eight years ago did not take into account the mine's impact on climate change. An environmental group sued in a bid to invalidate the permit. A court-ordered review by the...