Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/22/2010 11:31:12 AM PST by reaganaut1
President Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he'll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators. So a special oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency, which has turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular.
The scale of the EPA's current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration's entire first term—when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws.
Another measure of the EPA's aggressiveness are the six major traditional pollutants that the agency polices, such as ozone or sulfur dioxide. No Administration has ever updated more than two of these rules in a single term, and each individual rule has tended to run through a 15-year cycle on average since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970. Under administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA is stiffening the regulations for all six at the same time.
The hyperactive Ms. Jackson is also stretching legal limits to satisfy the White House's climate-change goals, now that Senate Democrats have killed cap and trade. The EPA's "endangerment finding" on carbon is most controversial, but other parts of her regulatory ambush may be more destructive by forcing mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of America's electricity.
A case study in the Jackson method is the EPA's recent tightening of air-quality standards for sulfur dioxide. The draft SO2 rule was released for the formal period of public comment last December.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Can’t we tie up these new regs in the courts for at least two years until the 2012 elections? Hopefully a Republican appointee can then scuttle them.
Let’s not forget ‘Dust Control’
http://www.democratherald.com/business/agriculture/article_25c1ca3a-a4bb-11df-8bb6-001cc4c03286.html
[ Republicans need to stifle the EPA. ]
And the FDA and the ATF, and the (insert TLA here).
Of course they will be too busy worring about Jebidiah selling stuff at the farmers market to care about china shipping cheap toxic over to sell at wal-mart.
[ Let’s not forget ‘Dust Control’
http://www.democratherald.com/business/agriculture/article_25c1ca3a-a4bb-11df-8bb6-001cc4c03286.html ]
“Dust control” is another mechanism designed to take away the land people own based off of abritary and poorly written regulations.
Farmers have been moving more and more to no-till and minimum till technologies in the last 30 years. A move that was championed by the market forces, so it is natural now that the government step up to claim sucess and at the same gather more control.
They have been very busy adding “impaired waters” to their ever growing list regulated via TMDLs under the Clean Water Act. Our farmers and ranchers now require a permit to farm, allowing the EPA to dictate how they farm, where they farm, irrigate and graze cattle.
Republicans need to reinstate Article I Section 1: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,”
It is unconscionable for Congress to set up little dictatorships to eat out the substance of the people.
They cannot unless American voters know about these issues.
FReepers need to be sending these articles out daily to their email lists.
We cannot allow the MSM to paint the GOP as earth-killers.
What are impaired waters?
“Can’t we tie up these new regs in the courts for at least two years until the 2012 elections?”
Any rule issued by the EPA can be challenged by me, you, anyone, under the Data Quality Act. The DQA demands that any rule issued by a federal agency must be based on the best science. If it’s not, the rule is void.
So if you’re learned in science, you can challenge any EPA rule or any part of it. The federal courts are also bound by DQA, including the USSC.
So yes, the EPA can be tied up for years, probably well past 2012.
“...allowing EPA to dictate how they farm, ...”
Jefferson said “Were we to be told when to sow and when to reap by Washington, we should soon want for bread.”
http://www.epa.gov/region9/water/tmdl/303d.html
The waterbody is assessed for all of its “beneficial uses.” Then quantitative or narravtive standards are established for each beneficial use. “Impaired” waters are those that do not meet the established standards.
For instance, in my watershed, salmon need certain temperature water to thrive. We don’t achieve that, so we are “impaired.” It does not seem to matter that the temperature in summer here exceeds 100 degreesF.
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