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Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and the attorneys general of 11 other states sued the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday, demanding that the agency turn over documents the states allege will show the agency cooperates with environmental groups as part of a "sue and settle" legal strategy to develop regulations. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, alleges that binding consent decrees between the EPA and environmental groups that have sued the agency over the years have led to new rules and regulations for states without allowing their attorneys general to defend their interests and those of its...

When I get Paul Bulmahn on the phone rumors are swirling that he’s just days from putting his company, ATP Oil & Gas, into Chapter 11. He can’t confirm it yet, but he wants to make one thing perfectly clear: If it does come to bankruptcy (which it did on August 17) it isn’t his fault. The founder and chairman of publicly traded ATP (Nasdaq:ATPG), Bulmahn wants the world to know that the Obama Administration—and its illegal ban on deepwater drilling in the wake of the BP disaster—is to blame for the implosion of his company. Not him. “It is...

So looks like the EPA is taking a swipe at Romney, which is funny because I thought ads by the government couldn;t be overtly political.... Oh well I guess them insinuating that due to the "higher efficiency standards" pushed down everyone's throat that the dog on Romney's car will have to stay there even longer.... This is a stupendously stupid low blow by the EPA... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgs1XH3PqEM

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe plans to highlight a little-known speech by an EPA regional administrator who admitted on video that the Obama’s administration’s air regulations will kill the coal industry. “Lisa Jackson has put forth a very powerful message to the country. Just two days ago, the decision on greenhouse gas performance standard and saying basically gas plants are the performance standard which means if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem. That was a huge decision,” Region 1 EPA Administrator Curtis “Curt” Spalding says, in footage filmed at Yale University. “You can’t imagine...

The Environmental Protection Agency held 12 hours of stacked hearings in Washington, D.C. and Chicago on Thursday in favor of a regulation that analysts have concluded would kill the building of new conventional coal plants in the U.S. Among the participants scheduled to testify in consecutive five minute blocks throughout the day were multiple representatives from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and environmental activists from the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. The proposed rule, reported by The Washington Post in March, limits the amount of greenhouse gases emitted...

In obscure, blue-collar towns across Appalachia -- places that most Americans have never seen -- generations of coal miners have toiled away at back-breaking labor to power American homes and industry. Now, as many as 200,000 of them who dig, process, transport and burn America's most abundant fuel are threatened by EPA's latest coal rule. It imposes a standard for emissions that is all but impossible for many plants to meet. It requires coal-fired plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. The only means for many older plants to attain that standard is...

In a Senate speech, Senator Inhofe will draw attention to a little known video from 2010, which shows a top EPA official, Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz, using the vivid metaphor of crucifixion to explain EPA's enforcement tactics for oil and gas producers. In this video Administrator Armendariz says: "But as I said, oil and gas is an enforcement priority, it's one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production. And I gave, I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my...

Justice Samuel Alito seemed none too pleased last week with the government’s argument in a case pitting property owners against the Environmental Protection Agency. Four years ago, Mike and Chantell Sackett bought property to build their dream home near a lake in Idaho. After obtaining local permits the Sacketts began work, pouring in some land fill. But their work came to a screeching halt when they were visited by officials from the Environmental Protection Agency. The couple was slapped with a compliance order asserting that the land is subject to the Clean Water Act and that they had illegally placed...

By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner This article, the second in a series, focuses on the misleading performance claims surrounding the “more energy efficient” compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs now replacing traditional incandescent bulbs. These potentially harmful mercury-filled lamps (see my previous column describing the dangers) are being forced on consumers by the U.S. congress with support from the Green Lobby and light-bulb manufacturers like GE, Sylvania and Phillips. These and other manufacturers stand to make huge profits selling the more expensive CFLs (more on that issue in my next column). There is a growing body of evidence...

Gosh, it’s tough to figure out why that recovery is stalled. The Orwellian nightmare of running a business in the shadow of the Obama Administration is nicely captured in this story from the New York Times, which explains why motor fuel companies are about to be fined $6.8 million for failure to use a biofuel that does not exist: In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming. Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of total U.S. emissions. According to an Associated Press analysis of the data, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in...

In an apparent attempt to shore up support from environmentalists ahead of the presidential election, President Barack Obama made a trip to the Environmental Protection Agency to thank employees for what he said was the “historic progress” they’ve made in protecting the environment. “You protect the environment not just for our children but their children, and keep us moving toward energy independence,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to about 200 employees at the EPA’s headquarters in D.C. The president also sought to tamp down criticism from some business groups and Republican presidential candidates that environmental regulations hamper economic growth....

With a federal government lawyer conceding almost every criticism leveled at the way the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency compels landowners to avoid polluting the nation’s waterways, the Supreme Court on Monday seemed well on its way toward finding some way to curb that agency’s enforcement powers. Their task was made easier as Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart stopped just short of saying that EPA was just as heavy-handed as its adversaries — and several of the Justices — were saying. Perhaps the most telling example: when several of the Justices expressed alarm that a homeowner targeted by EPA’s...

Since 2007, Mike and Chantell Sackett have been fighting to build their dream home on the Idaho lot they bought years ago. The Sacketts say they had gotten local permits and spent thousands prepping the land for construction - then the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed up. The EPA told the Sacketts their property contained wetlands and issued a compliance order mandating that they return it to its original state or risk facing fines starting at $37,500 per day. The Sacketts say they were stunned, and asked the EPA for a hearing on the matter. The agency denied their request,...

WASHINGTON — Several Supreme Court justices are criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency for heavy-handed enforcement of rules affecting homeowners. The justices were considering whether to let a North Idaho couple challenge an EPA order identifying their land as “protected wetlands.” Mike and Chantell Sackett of Priest Lake wanted to build their house on the land. But the EPA says the Sacketts can’t challenge the order to restore the land to wetlands or face thousands of dollars in fines. Justice Samuel Alito called EPA’s actions “outrageous.” Justice Antonin Scalia noted the “high-handedness of the agency” in dealing with private property. Chief...

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency abruptly changed its mind Saturday about delivering fresh water to residents of a northeastern Pennsylvania village where residential wells were found to be tainted by a natural gas drilling operation. Only 24 hours after promising them water, EPA officials informed residents of Dimock that a tanker truck wouldn't be coming after all -- an about-face that left them furious, confused and let down -- and, once again, scrambling for water for bathing, washing dishes and flushing toilets. Agency officials would not explain why they reneged on their promise, or say whether water...

To understand how the Environmental Protection Agency operates, one must first understand that it lies all the time. Its “estimates” are bogus. Its claims of lives saved are bogus. It thrives on scare-mongering to a public that is science-challenged, but the science remains and the EPA must be challenged to save the nation from the loss of the energy it needs to function. It must be challenged to unleash the huge economic benefits of energy resources—coal, oil, and natural gas—that can reverse our present economic decline. The latest outrage is the MACT rule—an acronym for “maximum achievable control technology” intended...

PRIEST LAKE, Idaho — Chantell and Mike Sackett’s dream house, if it is ever built, will have to be situated just so in order to minimize the view of neighboring homes and maximize the vista of pristine water and conifer-covered mountain. But their roughly half-acre lot in the Idaho Panhandle has proved to be the perfect staging ground for a conservative uproar over the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency. This month, the Supreme Court will review the Sacketts’s four-year-long effort to build on land that the EPA says contains environmentally sensitive wetlands. A decision in the couple’s favor could...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that will give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June. The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academies of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts and about half...

Psychoanalysis is usually the wrong way to understand politics, but the Obama Administration may be reviving the field with its Freudian slips. The latest to land on the couch is Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, who gave an unintentionally candid interview this weekend with Thalia Assuras of Energy Now News.