EPA Facts

Category Archive: Regulations

  1. Feds Join Chorus of Critics Opposed to EPA’s Water Grab

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    EPA employees have taken flak recently for watching porn at work, pretending to be secret agents, and defecating in hallways. Now they’re under fire from yet another critic: other government agencies.

    A few months ago, EPA proposed a rule to “clarify” the definition of “waters of the United States” subject to regulation under Clean Water Act. EPA claims the rule is noncontroversial and won’t have a major impact on the economy. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) thinks otherwise.

    In an Oct. 1 letter to EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, SBA urged EPA to withdraw its proposed water rule, explaining that it would impose “a direct and potentially costly impact on small businesses.” SBA criticized EPA for pushing the rule forward before analyzing potential small business impacts as required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act.

    Fellow government employees are hardly the only critics of EPA’s power grab. Farmers and ranchers see the rule as a dramatic expansion of the agency’s regulatory authority to potentially include ponds and ditches on private property. As the American Farm Bureau puts it, “EPA and the Corps are now attempting to regulate virtually all water.” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has called such concerns “ludicrous.”

    A broad and growing coalition has emerged to oppose EPA’s water rule. That EPA continues to dismiss these critics is indicative of the agency’s tin ear toward those affected by its radical agenda.

  2. INFOGRAPHIC: Top 12 States Threatened by EPA’s Ozone Rule

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    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to propose draconian cuts in ozone levels that will destroy jobs across the country. We’ve created an infographic based on new research from respected economists which finds that EPA’s proposal could be the costliest regulation in U.S. history without improving public health. The infographic shows the 12 states that face the most severe job losses under EPA’s expected ozone proposal.

    Click here to view the infographic.

    Click here to learn more about the EPA ozone rule.

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  3. Gina McCarthy Admits that Agency is Waging War on Coal?

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    On Friday, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy finally appeared to admit what the rest of us have known for years: The EPA is waging a war on coal. In an interview on the show Real Time with Bill Maher, the famously-liberal host asked whether the EPA was waging a war on coal. After affirming the EPA’s mission, McCarthy then responded, “That’s exactly what this is.”

    This war has been well documented. The EPA’s recently proposed (and euphemistically named) Clean Power Plan is just the latest in a string of regulations that experts say will decimate the country’s coal industry. The war hasn’t come as a big surprise, though. President Obama clearly warned at the outset of his first term that his administration would bankrupt anyone who tried to operate a coal plant.

    And yet, until now, the EPA and its mouthpieces have consistently denied waging this war, even in the face of mounting evidence. “There is no war on coal,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last year. Obama Administration water carriers Think Progress and Daily Kos both editorialized that such a war didn’t exist. Even McCarthy herself told the New York Times last year, “We don’t have a war on coal.”

    If this interview represents an about-face for McCarthy and the EPA, it likely signifies an even more emboldened agency no longer scared to obscure its mission in public. Based on its recent history, this should strike fear into the heart of every American.

  4. Left-of-Center Think Tank Slams EPA For Shoddy Research

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    No one would accuse the Brookings Institution of being a bunch of Tea Party radicals. In fact, the think tank is a bellwether of left-of-center thought in Washington, DC. So it’s an indication of just how far from reality the EPA has strayed that two Brookings scholars have criticized the math behind its new carbon regulations.

    Brookings fellow Ted Gayer and Vanderbilt University economist Kip Vicusi argue that the agency incorrectly counts the “global” benefits of its regulations, while only taking into account local costs. That crooked bit of accounting making the proposed regulations look much more beneficial than they actually are.

    Such “cherry picking” between global benefits and local costs allows the agency more leeway to advance its favored policies. The EPA estimates that the global climate benefits accruing from the regulations will be $30 billion by 2030. According to Gayer and Vicusi, however, “only 7 to 23 percent of these benefits would be domestic benefits,” meaning that the true “benefits” could be as low as $2.1 billion– far less than the estimated compliance cost for the rule of $7.3 billion.

    Like the recent misleading “heat related deaths” data, these juiced numbers were used as the basis for major new carbon regulations that will negatively impact the lives of millions of Americans. Whether these revelations are justification for killing the proposed regulations before they become law is yet to be seen. But it’s clear, according to the Brookings authors, that the expansion of “benefit assessments to include global impacts merits much more scrutiny and justification than it has received to date.”

  5. Energy Nannies Coming Soon to A Switch Near You

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    Lost in the talk about the EPA’s recent proposed cut to carbon emissions ismention of how the reduction will be based not only on energy supply regulations but also on end-use energy demand controls. That’s a fancy way to say that you’ll either pay more for the power you use (“demand pricing”), or you’ll have less control over your thermostat (“demand response”).

    Demand pricing is a management method where consumers are charged more for peak usage and less for off-peak usage. Most utilities already implement some form of peak pricing, but the new emission requirements will likely result in it being scaled up to a larger degree – to the point that some consumers may not be able to afford energy during the daytime. This is the case in the U.K., where Tata Steel regularly shuts down between 4-6 pm to avoid peak charges that can be up to 300 times the off-peak rate.

    Demand response is a management method where energy control is taken out of the consumer’s hands and given over to the utility to adjust based on the level of demand on the grid as a whole. This means that on peak days (e.g. a muggy summer afternoon) you may find that you cannot adjust your thermostat as you would like. Demand response programs that currently exist give us a good idea of what might become mandatory down the road. For example, in California, the utility installs an electric meter in your home or business that it reads and analyzes remotely and then adjusts electricity capacity accordingly.

    There are big concerns about how these demand controls would affect businesses. Higher costs and loss of energy control during peak times will make doing business during regular hours much more difficult. The situation in the U.K. is again instructive: Demand response has led utilities to ask factories to “voluntarily” shut down during peak hours. “This is the beginning of a world in which demand will be managed more actively by all of us consumers,” said Steve Holliday, the CEO of the country’s national grid.

    In addition to demand management, implementation of energy efficient products will likely be mandated by state governments needing to comply with the emissions standards. This means more nanny-like bans on your favorite consumer products like incandescent light bulbs, which have essentially been made illegal since the beginning of this year.

    Higher prices, more regulations, and less freedom – demand controls are a perfect fit for the EPA’s agenda.

  6. EPA Uses Bad Science to Try to Achieve the Nearly Impossible

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    The country has made incredible progress over the last few decades in drastically reducing the six most common air pollutants. But that hasn’t stopped the EPA from using bad science to push costly new regulations in an attempt to remove a few more parts per billion (ppb) of particulates from the atmosphere—even if those pollutants naturally occur in certain regions at higher levels.

    Take ozone, for example. Environmental activists have sued to force the EPA to impose new ozone limits soon and the EPA is expected to lower the allowable concentration of ozone from the current 75 ppb (parts per billion) rate to between 60 and 70 ppb. (Despite the fact that the agency deemed, and a federal court agreed, 75 ppb safe as recently as 2008.) But such a stringent new standard verges on the ozone levels that already occur naturally in the atmosphere. Ozone exists at 71 ppb at Big Bend National Park in Texas, for example, where there is no man-made pollution.

    What’s worse, the EPA is using bad science to justify these new stringent standards. The overwhelming scientific evidence – hundreds of scientific studies – say ozone is safe at 75 ppb and no further health benefits will accrue with a more stringent standard. But the EPA refuses to evaluate all the scientific studies – called a “weight-of-evidence” analysis. This allows it to cherry-pick studies that confirm its position and ignore ones that do not.

    Drs. Sonja Sax and Julie Goodman, of the Harvard School of Public Health criticize EPA ozone science further. They call out the EPA for not adequately controlling for smoking or participants’ health problems in its ozone studies. This results in biased conclusions that indicate ozone causes more health problems than what robust science supports. They also say the EPA’s science is flawed because it uses unrealistic expectations that undermine its results:

    The EPA considers worst-case scenarios arguably to protect the most sensitive people in a population. However, in its ozone health-risk and exposure assessment, the EPA makes many “worst-case” assumptions that could not all occur at one time, leading to an unrealistic scenario that overestimates risks.

    What’s even worse is that the agency’s failing science is expected to fuel one of the most costly regulations in history—the EPA itself estimates that such a standard could cost the economy up to $90 billion annually.

  7. EPA Overlooks Hockey in Coolant Regulation

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    The EPA’s recent coolant requirements are bad news for hockey. The agency is mandating the elimination of the coolant R-22, also known as HCFC-22, used in most of the nation’s 1,900 indoor arenas. That means arena managers, hockey players, and hockey enthusiasts will see their costs rise with the coolant’s artificially high prices and outright ban in 2020.

    The EPA has banned the coolant’s use in new arenas since 2010 and will completely ban its manufacture and import starting in 2020. In preparation, the agency has proposed a phaseout schedule, reducing the amount that can be manufactured from 30 million pounds in 2015 to 6 million in 2019 and zero in 2020. (The mandates also affect other products that use the coolant such as refrigerators and air conditioners. But since their product life-cycles are much shorter than arenas, the switchover has been easier.)

    Arena managers are struggling to comply. Retrofits to newer, EPA approved coolants cost up to $2 million. To make matters worse, the artificially low supply of the coolant, dictated by the EPA’s phaseout schedule, has caused its price to spike, making it difficult for them to save for an eventual retrofit. Worries are that many arenas will not be able to stay in business in the coming years.

    “Not every EPA employee may be thinking about ice rinks,” said U.S. Sen Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who has been calling on EPA officials to improve its phaseout transparency and work with arena managers. “I think they have to treat it with a sense of urgency. They may not realize how much it would mean for an ice rink in a local community to have to sink a million dollars in without much notice.” Even if her calls for cooperation are heeded, however, the coolant mandates will make hockey even more expensive and put many local hockey programs on ice.