How the left sees the EPA economy killing regulations--it's really Bush's fault

Not only is it Bush's fault, but also Gingrich's--just in case he's the candidate Obama needs to run against.

What’s happened under Obama is that green drift has become a green sprint; his [Environmental Protection Agency] EPA’s schedule is, comparatively speaking, incredibly aggressive. This isn’t because Obama is a government-loving socialist; it’s because of two factors that played out before he even took office.

First, the Bush administration spent eight years slowwalking scientific review and cranking out rules too weak or ill-formed to withstand judicial scrutiny. In cases where the Bush EPA’s rules were challenged in federal court, the agency’s decisions were rejected in whole or in part eighteen out of twenty-seven times. That left an enormous backlog of court-mandated work for the EPA under Obama—more than any sane president would want, given the choice.

Second, there was a turning point in 2007: the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide, as long as it can be shown to “endanger public health or welfare,” qualifies as a pollutant within the EPA’s purview. The agency then conducted an “endangerment finding,” consulting the latest science, and determined that, yes, climate change is a threat. It e-mailed the results to the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget, which promptly … refused to open the e-mail. (Really.) That left the task of developing the first-ever regulations on CO2 to Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson.

The pace of rule making combined with the extension of the rules to greenhouse gases has given conservatives the “regulatory overreach” story they need to declare war, not only on the individual rules coming out of the EPA, but on the agency’s ability to implement rules at all.

This is not the first time a Congress full of hotheaded freshmen has gone after the EPA. When Newt Gingrich rode to power in the Republican Revolution of 1994, he made the agency one of his first targets. However, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein recounted in a recent column, Gingrich’s efforts quickly died out as more and more moderate Republicans turned against him. Back then, it was seen as politically dangerous to be pro-pollution.

Washington Monthly

Happy Birthday--EPA Turns 40

Lisa Jackson can sure put a happy face on a government entity that costs us billions. Oh, she says, but it employs 1.5 million people. That's how a bloated government looks at this--how many bureaucrats have jobs! She vastly underestimates the job security these agencies provide. Each grant whether to academe or states requires a bevy of researchers and staff with clerical peons and supplies all the way down to the waste basket and ink cartridges for the preliminary reports no one reads, to the HR departments that oversee the diversity quotas on the job.

Lisa P. Jackson: The EPA Turns 40 - WSJ.com

It's not that EPA is any different than say, the USDA, which no longer is set up to help to farmers, but instead to assist consumers. Its direct feeding programs for breakfast, lunch and snacks at schools employ many thousands of people, some on site handing out food, other packaging it, others delivering it, and some just printing the posters that must be visible at every feeding site, "With justice for all."

One of the richest counties in the country--Fairfax in Virginia--with a median income of $122,000 per household and a very low unemployment rate also has 42% of its kids eligible for school food aid from USDA. How else to keep all those government workers employed and the unemployment rate down?

EPA targets wrong enemy

We've known for half a century or more that our biggest health problems are self induced--misused sexuality, legal drugs we take voluntarily like cigarettes and alcohol, and overeating. Our personal habits are difficult for the government to control, although it does take a regulatory stance, primarily through taxes, when companies make huge profits from our bad behavior (the diet industry is huge, the "health food" industry massive, smoking cessation remedies are covered by government health plans with little proof they work, big pharma has made a fortune from AIDS and STDs. Now EPA is going after those evil toxins, not for our health, but to kill more industries and put more people out of work.

Despite the ongoing epidemics of cigarette-related disease, novel influenza and obesity, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is focusing on a very different set of purported health risks: deadly toxins and chemicals in "our bodies." This effort will do nothing to promote public health while raising needless anxiety and spurring expensive, useless regulation and litigation. . .

Administrator Jackson's program is amazingly unscientific--even for the EPA. Since the EPA addresses "risks" that are too small to be measured, and thus not amenable to quantification, they have resorted to ignoring benefits [of chemicals] and assessing only hazards. . .

Even the American Chemistry Council has signed on to EPA's new crusade--squirming to avoid the heavy penalties for non-compliance. Too bad ACC thereby implies that its member companies' products have been poisoning our kids all these years. That isn't the case; nonetheless they now want to be perceived as very sorry, eager to mend their ways and thankful for the EPA's help.

Full story at Forbes.com