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Environment/Energy · Regulation

EPA Delivers Holiday ‘Sucker Punch’ to U.S. Economy

While you were getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Environmental Protection Agency was cooking up a turkey of its own — a new “permitting guidance for greenhouse gases” that is unconstitutional and would extend the reach of Obama’s EPA into how nearly every American business may operate. It’s nothing less than a sucker punch to the U.S. economy, and an end-run around failed “cap-and-trade” bills that would deliver cap without the trade.
The Heartland Institute worked over the holiday weekend to draw attention to this outrage, and will continue to do so in the days and weeks ahead.

Check out Heartland’s coverage of this issue by clicking here.

This piece by Heartland friend Larry Bell at Forbes.com can help get you up to speed. Meanwhile, Heartland’s senior fellow for legal affairs, Maureen Martin, summarizes this bureaucratic power grab:

On November 15, Obama’s EPA issued a 100-page, highly technical “guidance” document proposing that as of January 2, 2011, large sources of greenhouse gas emissions—such as power plants, steel operations, and petroleum refineries—be required to obtain preconstruction and operating permits limiting their greenhouse gas emissions and to install the “best available” technology to do so.

Comments on these new rules are due on or before December 1, 2010, a 14-day period interrupted by the four-day Thanksgiving holiday. And EPA says it will review only comments on technical aspects of the new rule.

Previously, no such permits were needed, and no greenhouse gas limits existed. It is widely agreed such new rules will drive up the costs of electricity, iron and steel, gasoline, and anything else produced by large operations, with these costs passed along to consumers already staggered by a jobless “recovery” from the recession.

James M. Taylor, Heartland’s senior fellow for environmental policy, has also weighed in:
Forcing power plants to purchase and implement the “best available” technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions every time a plant is built or any kind of significant maintenance or renovations occur, however, means by definition that electricity prices are going to start rising in a manner that will make the economy-shocking energy price spikes during the summer of 2008 seem downright wimpy by comparison.
For more information on this subject, click here. If you’d like to interview any of Heartland’s environmental policy experts for a story or to be a guest on your show, please contact Tammy Nash (tnash@heartland.org) or Jim Lakely (jlakely@heartland.org) via email, or call 312/377-4000.
The Heartland Institute is a 26-year-old national nonprofit organization based in Chicago. Our mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

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— Jim Lakely

Jim is the the director of communications at The Heartland Institute. Prior to joining Heartland, he was an ink-stained newspaperman for 16 years with many stops in "old media." Jim covered Congress and The White House during the George W. Bush administration for The Washington Times, and worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California. He has appeared on the Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, and many local and national talk radio shows to talk politics and policy.

  • Brian G Valentine

    The EPA is basically an organized crime syndicate that recognizes only Greenpiece and the IPCC as anything with legal authority. The US Constitution means nothing to these people; neither does the Rule of Law – they ARE the law, and they believe they have the authority to make any regulation they want to.

    The Obama administration uses the EPA in their extortion schemes. “Either Congress passes Cap and Trade, or EPA will regulate CO2.” It’s that simple – either do what we say or Organized Crime will do it for you, take your choice.

    Why, WHY did Tom De Lay goof up so badly? He came to elected government on an anti-EPA mission: sick of business owners like himself put out of business by the EPA, he took up the cause to fight back. Then De Lay unfortunately goofed up real bad.

    I hope the new Republicans take up the cause against this Greenpiece-directed Cosa Nostra and de-funds them. That’s the only way to stop them: don’t fund their regulatory activities.

    I hope the Congress does this before the Chinese start buying formerly American businesses for a dime on the dollar – and operate them in the US according to their rules