Posted on 01/27/2017 8:46:44 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
At the Republican National Convention last summer, the GOP approved a platform that stated: “We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science.” It also says “We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act.”
The GOP followed the lead of President Donald Trump, who in a March debate said he would abolish EPA, and in a May speech in North Dakota condemned “the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of totalitarian tactics” that has “denied millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under our feet. This is your treasure, and you – the American People – are entitled to share in the riches.”
Trump and the GOP are saying, finally, what millions of people have been thinking for a long time: EPA has become the cause of, not the solution to, the nation’s major environmental problems. It’s time to end EPA.
A Promising Beginning
In the late 1960s, the United States faced real problems regarding the quality of its air and water, waste disposal, and contamination from mining and agriculture. Pollution crossed borders – the borders between private property as well as between cities, states, and nations – and traditional remedies based on private property rights didn’t seem to be working. The public was overly complacent about the possible threat to their safety.
Many scientists, myself included, lobbied the federal government to form a cabinet-level agency to address these problems. [1] In 1971, EPA was born. During the agency’s first 10 years, Congress passed seven legislative acts to protect the environment, including the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act), Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Clean Air Act.
At first, these laws worked well, protecting the environment and the health of our citizens. Problems were identified, measured, exposed, and major investments were made to reduce dangerous emissions and protect the public from exposure to them. EPA and other government agencies regularly report the subsequent dramatic reduction in all the pollutants we originally targeted. By the 1980s, nothing more needed to be done beyond monitoring our continuing success in cleaning up the environment. It was time to declare victory and go home.
EPA Is Now an Obstacle
Beginning around 1981, however, radical Leftists realized they could advance their political agenda by taking over the environmental movement and use it to advocate for ever-more draconian regulations on businesses. Environmentalists allowed this take-over to occur because it brought massive funding from liberal foundations, political power, and prestige. [2]
Politicians realized they could win votes by pandering to the environmental movement, repeating their pseudo-scientific claims, and posing as protectors of nature and the public health. The wind, solar, and ethanol industries saw they could use regulations to handicap competitors or help themselves to public subsidies.
Today, EPA is a captive of activist and special-interest groups. Its regulations have nothing to do with protecting the environment. Its rules account for nearly half of the $2 trillion annual cost of complying with all national regulations in the United States.
In 2008, The Heritage Foundation estimated the costs of EPA’s first proposal to regulate greenhouse gases in the name of fighting global warming were “close to $7 trillion and three million manufacturing jobs lost.” According to Heritage, “the sweep of regulations … could severely affect nearly every major energy-using product from cars to lawnmowers, and a million or more businesses and buildings of all types. And all of this sacrifice is in order to make, at best, a minuscule contribution to an overstated environmental threat.”
President Barack Obama has routinely used EPA to circumvent Congress to impose severe regulations on farmers, ranchers, other private landowners, fisheries, and the energy sector. Just last week, the agency rushed through approval of new fuel efficiency standards for automobiles more than a year ahead of schedule to thwart any attempts by the Trump administration to stop it. Courts and Congress have objected to and tried to limit EPA’s abuses, but without noticeable success. Once a genuine success story, EPA has become the biggest obstacle to further environmental progress.
Replacing EPA
The solution is to return this authority to the states, replacing EPA with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.
State EPAs already have primary responsibility for the implementation of the nation’s environmental laws and EPA regulations. With more than 30 years of experience, these state agencies are ready to take over management of the nation’s environment.
Accountable to 50 governors and state legislatures, state EPAs are more attuned to real-world needs and trade-offs. Located in 50 state capitols, they are less vulnerable to the Left’s massive beltway lobbying machine.
The Committee would be made up of representatives from each state. EPA could be phased out over five years, which could include a one-year preparation period followed by a four-year program in which 25 percent of the agency’s activities would be passed to the Committee each year.
Seventy-five percent of EPA’s budget could be eliminated and most of the remainder would pay for national research labs. A small administrative structure would allow the states to refine existing environmental laws in a manner more suitable to protecting our environment without thwarting the development of our natural resources and energy supplies.
Benefits of Replacing EPA
The federal budget for environmental protection could be reduced from $8.6 billion to $2 billion or less. Staffing could be reduced from more than 15,000 to 300. The real savings, of course, would be in reduction of the $1 trillion in annual regulatory costs EPA imposes each year.
This reform would produce a second huge benefit by ending the government’s war on affordable energy. EPA is the principal funder and advocate of global warming alarmism, the myth that man-made climate change is a crisis. That movement would end on the day EPA’s doors shut, allowing Congress to return to taxpayers and consumers a “peace dividend” amount to some of the $4 billion a day currently spent world-wide on climate change.
Dismantling EPA is one part of a comprehensive set of reforms, many of them discussed by Trump and referred to in the GOP platform, to lighten the massive weight of government regulations on the American people. The nation needs a pro-energy, pro-environment, and pro-jobs agenda that recognizes the tremendous value of the natural resources under our feet.
While the rest of the world stumbles blindly in the grip of an anti-energy and anti-freedom ideology, the U.S. can march ahead and regain its place as the world’s economic and technological leader.
The nation’s environment is in terrific shape, thanks to early efforts by EPA and more recent efforts by state governments and businesses. The nation’s economy and environment will be even better if the federal government gets out of the way.
The EPA has long outlived its usefulness. Let’s return its powers to the states, where they belong.
Jay H. Lehr, Ph.D., jlehr@heartland.org, is science director of The Heartland Institute and editor of The Alternative Energy and Shale Gas Encyclopedia. (Wiley, 2016).
[1] See, for example, references in various footnotes to my testimony in 1973 on behalf of the Clean Water Act before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the Senate Committee on Commerce, 93d Cong., 1st Sess., (1973), here: Thomas J. Douglas, Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 – History and Critique, 5 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 501 (1976),http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/ealr/vol5/iss3/5 andhttp://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1892&context=ealr.
[2] This story is told in many books, including Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization by Christopher Manes (1990), Freezing in the Dark: Money, Power, Politics, and the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy by Ron Arnold, R. (2007), and In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology by Alston Chase (1995).
I remember talking to a woman in Purchasing at a company where I worked once that told me she had to track all of the White Out they used (back when people still bought White Out), and all the fluorescent bulbs they bought. I thought she was making that up, and told her to just ignore it. She told me there were fines if she couldn’t track the information in detail. Unbelievable.
LEDs seem, at least, to be wonderful. If some people are bothered by the 60Hz oscillation, I would think that it would be possible to power LEDs with DC, which wouldn’t have the problem.It definitely would be an added cost, I admit - but it’s beginning to look like LEDs are cost-effective, so it might be tolerable. Incandescents do burn out . . .
At least it’d beat going back to kerosene lamps.
My EZ Bake oven doesn't seem to work as well with an LED though, LOL.
Please bring back gasoline cans with normal spouts and air vents!!!
Lifetime supply...Me too.
BUT, now that the LEDs are down to a buck and SO much brighter
my senior eyes like them better.
I found the incandescent bulb ban to be not just stupid, but something the fed gov never ever should have gotten into. It’s one item that proves Bush was a closet lefty.
Now leaving it up to the states, I can see this. Where in warm states like southern Cal, the excess heat created by the bulb would be a detriment.
But in states where it’s cool most of the year, the heat byproduct of an incandescent bulb is a plus. I use a 60 watt bulb to heat the well house, just keep it above freezing.
LED bulbs are good and more energy efficient (less heat and uses less electricity), but they cost a significant multiple of what incandescent bulbs cost. It will take many years to cover the investment in the new bulbs to make it worthwhile to switch over if we now had a choice.
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Who was it that used the phrase about the “giant sucking sound?”
EPA exit plan
Excellent now take half of the Bureau of Land Management too.
It doesn't matter what level of government we examine..., all will continue to exist if not checked by budgetary and judicial restraints! The same holds true for charities! Once formed, should they "Cure" a societal ill, they will morph into a new quest to keep their relevancy!
Let us fervently hope that we will see some reduction of non-essential agency powers in the coming years! President Reagan failed, perhaps President Trump will succeed!
Me too! I have like, 8 cases of 60 watts.
And Primatine Mist?
Its not about money its about medical condition. See my posts above.
I read those posts. My point was thatI hope my jargon is not incomprehensible . . .
- Not everyone suffers from that medical condition (howbeit not everyone is handicapped, and we have people suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act to require accommodations which are far more intrusive than not forbidding the sale of incandescent lights).
- 60Hz alternating current heats the bulb’s filament to a white heat, and that heating actually occurs at 120 Hz and higher harmonics thereof. The filament has thermal inertia; its temperature and therefore its brightness does not drop to zero (or anything like it) when the current instantaneously drops to zero twice in each sinusoidal cycle. That is why your husband tolerates the light of an incandescent bulb so much better than that of an LED which experiences 60Hz alternating current.
- Although it is inevitable that the electrical energy input to any household light will be 60Hz AC, it is possible - even routine - for that power input to be converted to (essentially) steady Direct Current. Every charger for a phone or laptop computer includes a rectifier. People who are bothered by LED light are not, I presume, necessarily bothered by the light from a laptop computer - and yet the laptop computer’s screen is nothing but an array of LEDs.
The implication would be that you could arrange a circuit with rectifier diodes and coils, capacitors, and/or rechargeable batteries which you could interpose between the 60Hz AC power and the LED. That circuit would provide the electrical equivalent of the thermal inertia of the incandescent bulb, and the result would be that the light from an LED fed by such a circuit would be flicker-free.
- My point in referring to the efficiency and service life advantages of the LEL was only in the context of the cost you would incur to implement the circuit I propose. My proposal would cost money, without a doubt - but not necessarily more money than the LED would save you in electricity cost and in the cost of the shorter life of the incandescent bulb.
A couple years back, I bought probably forty dimmable LED bulbs from Costco for around $300 or so. My power bill went from around $100 per month to $65. They’re already (twice) paid for. We’ve had one bulb fail, and it was brand new. Swapped it for a good one.
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