President Obama’s EPA usually has a bad habit of kicking American industry when it’s down by dumping on them with unnecessary regulations, regardless of what business leaders say the effects will be.

Usually. Which is why the latest fiasco over the Agency’s proposed Boiler MACT rule is so noteworthy.

After writing new rules in mid-2011 that would require electricity-generating boilers to meet a shockingly high emissions standard – at a capital cost of $9.5 billion – a wide swath of industries, most notably the paper and wood business, pushed back. EPA was set to impose the rules anyway, risking hundreds of thousands of jobs, sky-high costs, and electrical production capacity.

Yet shockingly, EPA suddenly changed its mind in December, apparently having listened to the industries’ criticisms and deciding to stay any formal enactment of the proposed rules. EPA wanted more time to study the potential effects and revise the regulations.

But of course, the environmentalist left wouldn’t have that. From the PJ Tatler: (more…)

Tuesday’s State of the Union address is noteworthy because it appears to signal a change in the Administration’s approach to US energy development. If so, this is welcome news. Truly embracing an “all of the above” energy strategy that allows for the robust development of our oil and natural gas resources in the immediate term would boost economic development, lessen our dependence on hostile oil regimes, and save American consumers from record-high fuel costs.

However, while these words are encouraging, the Administration’s actions over the last three years tell a different story.

One highlight was the President’s emphasis on natural gas — a game-changer for the US economy. President Obama mentioned the words “manufacturing” and “manufacturers” fifteen times. This is because manufacturers of such commodities as steel, paint, fertilizer and chemicals, who use natural gas as a feedstock, have seen record low prices for the commodity in the United States. The boom in natural gas, created by the combination of two old technologies – horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — has made the resource abundant and extremely affordable. Low energy prices, driven by an increased supply, benefits all Americans. This resource has been and should continue to be developed safely and without jeopardizing our environment. Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent considerable time and effort over the past few years trying to impose new regulations on natural gas production that could, in effect, render future production uneconomical.

The President also failed to mention the Keystone XL pipeline. His Administration’s decision just last week to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, a $7 billion energy infrastructure project built completely with private funds, could bring over 700,000 barrels of oil from Montana, North Dakota, and our trusted friend Canada and create thousands of union jobs during construction. If his Administration is serious about generating new jobs and economic growth through energy policy, there is no better, or more immediate, way than approving this “shovel ready” project.

While his emphasis on the return of domestic manufacturing rightfully deserves attention, he left out several other key energy issues – some of which could strengthen energy security and put Americans back to work in weeks, not years. (more…)

Now we know why President Obama isn’t spending any time fighting a war on unemployment. He’s too busy fighting his war on coal.

Indeed, while the past few months have seen tiny signs our economy might be growing despite Obama’s anti-job policies, the White House is ramping up its effort to make sure our labor force is expunged of every last coal job it can find. It’d be humorous if it wasn’t so real.

If we start exposing this radical nonsense coming out of the Obama EPA, conservatives can push back on these bad policies. Environmentalists rarely get their way when people actually pay attention to what they want to do.

The latest battle will be coming any day now, as the EPA has said it will issue its Utility NSPS (New Source Performance Standards) sometime in January. Any new utility plants will have to meet a new set of environmental standards – standards that conveniently work out great for natural gas but are prohibitively expensive for coal plants, even new ones, to meet.

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We never thought that there would be a problem with an Obama administration regulatory agency not regulating enough, but that bizarre day has come. The Federal Electric Reliability Commission (FERC), which is charged with ensuring that the nation’s power grid remain operational, is frozen like a deer in the headlights when it comes to a pair of incoming EPA rules that pose a grave threat to reliability.

To repeat: in the one instance when we actually need federal regulators to intervene, the agency in question is failing to do its job.  Oh, the irony.

From Politico:

A FERC DIVIDED – It’s not only lobbyists and lawmakers who are arguing over whether EPA regulations pose a threat to the U.S. electric grid. The debate has consumed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the board tasked with ensuring the nation a reliable supply of electricity.

The most outspoken commissioner, Philip Moeller, is pushing for his agency to scrutinize EPA’s proposals more closely, while saying the EPA should consider delaying implementation of some rules for more than a year. But fellow Commissioners Cheryl LaFleur and John Norris argue that delaying the rules might run afoul of the certainty that Moeller is seeking.

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The vote on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J. Res) 6 – the Resolution of Disapproval to undo the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s illegal, unilateral Network Neutrality Internet power grab – is a watershed moment for the members of the Senior Circuit.

The FCC – in fact no federal Agency, Department or Commission – can do anything unless and until Congress writes a law that says “Yo – do this.”

As a unanimous D.C. Circuit Court pointed out in April of 2010, Congress has never done this for the FCC with regard to the Internet and Net Neutrality.

The Commission clearly, simply doesn’t have the juice to do what they again did last December.  It is an egregious overreach, and it must be undone.

Senators – not agencies like the FCC – write laws.  That’s their gig.  Each and every Senator that votes against S.J. Res 6 is giving up on what they asked their constituents to send them to Washington to do.

To vote No is to give up on being an elected representative of We the People.

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Big Government has learned of a shocking new dimension to the emerging Fisker Karma scandal: not only is the U.S. taxpayer-backed car manufactured overseas, but it is far less fuel-efficient than its main American competitor, the Chevrolet Volt.

ABC News reports this evening that the U.S. Department of Energy gave $529 million in loan guarantees to Fisker Automotive to assist in the production of the sporty Karma, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

Instead of manufacturing the Karma in the United States, however, Fisker is building the electric vehicle in Finland–creating 500 jobs overseas with American taxpayers’ money:

“There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle,” the car company’s founder and namesake told ABC News. “They don’t exist here.”

Industry insiders have told Big Government that they are alarmed by another, largely unreported fact about the Fisker Karma: the car only gets 20 miles per gallon (mpg) of fuel when its gasoline engine is running.

Fisker revealed this week that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rated the Karma at 52 MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent)–the car’s effective fuel efficiency range when its electric motor is combined with its range-extending gasoline engine.

However, Fisker communications director Roger Ormisher revealed that the gasoline engine itself only performs at 20 mpg.

Even General Motors’s Chevrolet Volt performs better, according to Green Car Reports:

The comparable figures for the 2012 Chevrolet Volt–which has a less powerful single 111-kilowatt (149-hp) drive motor and an 80-hp, 1.4-liter range extender–are 94 MPGe in electric mode, and 37 mpg on gasoline, with an electric range of 35 miles. (more…)

Some called it a gaffe when current Vice President Joe Biden was caught on video saying, “No Coal Plants Here in America,” during the 2008 campaign. Now, thanks to a bit of curious timing, the Obama administration may be a step closer to achieving that very thing, destroying up to 1.4 million jobs in the progress. The move will also lead to a significant increase in energy prices; however, it may be too late to do anything about all that by the time the information comes to light. And yet some think Wall Street, not Washington, is the problem.

Here’s the issue–one part of it, anyway. Connect the dots, beginning with this Federal Energy Regulatory Commission item.

FERC has scheduled a hearing next month to discuss the reliability of the power grid, particularly in regards to concerns stemming from new EPA regulations. Critics of the EPA have made reliability a central theme of their attack on new pollution regulations for power plants and pressed FERC to evaluate their concerns. The hearing is set for November 29.

That sounds good, until one realizes that the EPA intends to put some of said new regulations in effect, over the objections of many states, before their likely impact is discussed more broadly. (more…)

Every five years, the National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) conducts a “Census of Agriculture” that includes a snapshot of America’s black farmers–how many, average farm size, sales, etc. Since 2007 was the last year the census was conducted, election year 2012 will give us our next best picture of how agricultural communities generally and black farmers in particular are managing through the economic downturn.

Because the 2007 agriculture census was conducted before the economy began to slide, it is probably safe to say that what we think we know today may not necessarily be true when fresh data becomes available. At the time of the census, there was plenty of room for optimism, though.

The numbers showed that the U.S. farming and ranching population was becoming much more diverse and the number of black farmers and ranchers was on the upswing. Blacks have a history of small business entrepreneurialism in this country, and farming and ranching represent a natural entry point for them. Because their enterprises are smaller, however, economic shocks put them in a more precarious position financially.

Having grown up on a tobacco farm and worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I can tell you that the concerns that keep black farmers up at night are not unique and are shared by farmers of all stripes. Aside from some specific issues of discrimination, black farmers worry about access to capital, pray for a little luck with the weather, and wish for a more predictable regulatory environment. High levels of uncertainty translate into a lack of investments and lack of jobs on the farm, just as on Wall Street. (more…)

The EPA has justified much of its job-killing regulatory agenda by citing promises of improved public health and reduced health care costs to treat respiratory illnesses it claims are exacerbated by airborne pollution. They’ve even recruited advocacy groups like the American Lung Association to publicly endorse the rules.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson

However, the medical community remains unconvinced.  Medical professionals and U.S. Reps. Paul Broun, Larry Bucshon, Michael Burgess, Bill Cassidy, John Fleming, Phil Gingrey and Paul Gosar have written a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging her to delay implementation of the proposed Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology rule (MACT), which imposes stringent new standards on coal-fueled power plants.

Why this particular policy? Well, the Utility MACT rule is expected to cause widespread shutdowns of power plants across the country.  The letter signers state that the proposed rule will actually hurt public health by raising electricity prices and thus health care costs, therefore negating any supposed longer-term health benefits.

From the letter:

We ask that the EPA take into account the direct and indirect costs associated with the proposed rule and withdraw the rule until we can be assured of its positive contribution to public health…

It is well established that additional costs placed upon the healthcare and economic sectors of our country may actually damage public health and raise premature death rates.  Given the extremely high cost of the Utility MACT proposal – perhaps the most expensive in the Agency’s history – we ask that the EPA take into account the direct and indirect costs associated with the proposed rule and withdraw the rule until we can be assured of its positive contribution to public health.  The American public deserves no less.

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It is not uncommon to hear of lawsuits being filed against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Citizens and states might sue the EPA for overregulation of an industry that could lead to lost jobs and revenues.  Green groups might sue the EPA because they feel it hasn’t done enough to over-regulate businesses or to expand enforcement of current environmental laws.

But it is important to note that in many cases the EPA and Treasury Department are required to award attorney’s fees to those plaintiffs that successfully dispute the EPA.  And because the Justice Department is what defends the EPA in court cases, your tax dollars are what are used to pay the opposing sides’ attorneys.

Facts on just how much taxpayer money is spent on these environmental court cases and who benefits wasn’t well known until Senators Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and David Vitter, R-La., and a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), shed some light on the subject.

The GAO report found that in addition to attorney’s fees awarded, the Justice Department spent at least $43 million in taxpayer dollars defending EPA in court from 1998 to 2010.  That doesn’t include the fact that Treasury paid about $14.2 million from fiscal year 2003 through 2010 and the EPA paid approximately $1.4 million from fiscal year 2006 through 2010.

Because most people don’t have millions of dollars on hand to sue the EPA if need be, these statutes were put into place so citizens and industries could afford to bring charges against the federal government.  However, less than 20 percent of awarded money has been given to private industries, citizens, state agencies and associations combined.  This begs the question, what were the largest beneficiaries of these payouts?

The three primary beneficiaries from 1998 to 2010 were: Sierra Club, Earthjustice and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  Total amounts these organizations received from all attorney fees paid to EPA litigants combined was at least 41 percent of the total payouts.  Earthjustice alone received 32 percent, as indicated by this report.

Go figure that the primary beneficiaries of statutes set to protect citizens and private industries would instead be awarded to environmental groups that want nothing more than to extend the power and grasp of the federal government’s EPA.

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Someday we’ll all look back at this and laugh. Or cry. These are the dark days for small business and would-be entrepreneurs, who need only to open the newspaper, click on their iPad, or flick on the TV to see another attack on anyone who would have the temerity to start a business and produce something with their own ingenuity, drive, and hard work.

As America’s big-government “leaders” take us down the tubes, here’s what the future will record for the last couple days:

• A bill in the California legislature would force parents to pay state-level minimum wage to babysitters, as well as provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck
• President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has issued two more rulings that will carpet-bomb employers with “micro-union” organizing drives and repeal one of the last protections employees had if they wanted to choose a union by secret ballot election

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To say environmentalists are immune to reality is an understatement. When anyone dare question their conclusions, their deeply held “religious” beliefs, they are immediately attacked as a heretic, or worse, a shill for whatever industry they are trying to destroy. The soundness of the science, and the lack of such on their part, is irrelevant, it’s agenda uber alles. They find someone involved in what goes against their view who they can play “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with and connect to whatever industry/organization they’re trying to destroy and claim that discredits everything contrary to their orthodoxy. But every once in a while something so beautifully karmic happens…That’s what this is about.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

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The domestic Right has for decades been calling for a reduction in the size, scope and sphere of influence of government.

All the while, we have endured an excruciating and – it had begun to seem – inexorable growth of the federal Leviathan.

And after decades of incremental government expansion, it has in the last four years exploded.  Up 29% – from $2.7 trillion to $3.82 trillion.

An insane financial flurry – that gave rise to the Tea Party.  And thanks to them, for the first time… ever, we are discussing cutting the budget.

Not reducing the rate of growth – actually cutting.

The Left has of course rushed to the defense of their titanic spending status quo – ever increasing expenditures until we all collectively collapse in a bankrupt heap.

Their primary pseudo-reasoning has been that reducing the government’s size does nothing to create jobs.  That the desire to rein in this fiscal insanity is nothing more than ideological inanity.  And that ONLY more government spending will generate gigs.

Seeking to reduce spending is called by them “Economic Know-Nothingism.”

Vice President Joe Biden notoriously asserted “we got to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.”

Seeking to outdo the Vice President, Moody’s issued an asinine report that said Republican plans to cut a paltry $61 billion – from, again, a $3.82 trillion budget, with a $1.65 trillion deficit – would result in the loss of 700,000 jobs.

Let us quickly do some math here.

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President Obama, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, was right to focus on the challenges the United States faces as domestic companies try to compete with low-cost global competitors. But he was wrong to suggest that the United States can “win the future” by getting Washington more involved in innovation and education.

As the president conceded elsewhere, Washington is, in fact, a big part of the problem—with high corporate tax rates and excessive regulation.

Just a week earlier in a Wall Street Journal article, the president elaborated on this, rhetorically declaring a truce with business and laying out the administration’s strategy for moving “toward a 21st-century regulatory system.”

Mr. Obama said this new system would need to strike a balance between the innovativeness, job-creating capacity and robust growth produced by free markets and the responsibility of government to impose “common-sense rules” to protect the public. He called for a “government-wide review of . . . rules already on the books,” and said that “careful consideration” would be given to the costs and benefits of all pending regulations. But as Yogi Berra once said, “This is like deja vu all over again.”

Presidents Clinton and Reagan both signed executive orders requiring that proposed federal regulations be implemented only if their economic benefits exceeded the costs of complying with them. Reagan even established a branch within the Office of Management and Budget—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—to make sure executive branch agencies complied. The executive orders by and large were ineffective.

In fact, the federal government has been expanding its control of the private economy since the 1890s, on the theory that vulnerable people must be protected from cradle to grave by an omniscient bureaucracy that knows what’s best for them. The growth in regulation typically has been justified by analyses, prepared by the regulatory bureaus themselves, which grossly overstate regulation’s benefits and understate its costs.

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Sad to say, what I wrote last year at this time is hardly less apt today:  “The State of the Union Address is ordinarily a bore. It generally consists of a laundry list of proposals, and the list nearly always seems interminable. If Barack Obama has moxie, however, tonight could be different. His State of the Union Address could be a real game changer.”

“Here,” I then wrote, “is how he could do it – if he was really intent on saving his Presidency and on turning a disgraceful performance in that office into something worthy of eulogy. This evening, after the usual formalities, he could say:

My fellow Americans, let me begin by stating the obvious. The state of our union is not good. We seem to be – we may be – coming out of a recession. But, if so, the recovery is not only jobless; it is accompanied by an increase in employment.

This is contrary to my expectation. When I became President, my economic advisers told me that the rate of unemployment would be considerably lower now than it is. They were mistaken, and I erred in taking their advice. The fault is mine. I may not have gotten us into a severe recession, but I advanced proposals and I pursued policies which have prolonged and deepened it. I am at fault.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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Environmental Protection Agency officials Wednesday provided power companies and states with new guidance on EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases.

A D.C. lobbyist for two major power companies told Bloomberg News that “the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium” as a consequence.

Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire.

EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority.

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A funny thing happened on the way to the voting booth: Americans discovered that most federal “stimulus” funds were being used to stimulate government, not the economy.

I was on the road recently, driving from my home in southeast Louisiana through a long stretch of Mississippi to Tuscaloosa, Ala., then to the outskirts of Birmingham and on to Auburn, Ala., and finally back to my home by way of Montgomery and Mobile. Along the way I was slowed from time to time as I passed by road and bridge repair projects marked with prominent signs indicating they were funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama’s so-called stimulus bill.

Naturally I was thrilled to see my tax dollars at work, although honesty compels me to report that not much actual work seemed to be going on at any of the sites. Most of the visible workers were just standing around. Of course, such standing around is typical of public construction projects, so I don’t suppose that what I saw was in any way owing to the stimulus funding in particular.

This huge legislative enactment provides for a great variety of increased spending and some reduction in taxes over a period of 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office computed that the net amount of money to be injected into, or not removed from, the economy as a result of the stimulus bill totals about $787 billion.

At the time the bill was being debated and discussed, a common plea in its defense had to do with funding so-called shovel-ready projects to repair or replace public roads, bridges and other structures widely taken to be in a state of decay or disrepair. This plea made an appealing talking point, since most Americans place at least some value on such infrastructure.

Alas, only a tiny proportion of the funds expended so far has been directed to this well-advertised objective.

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Two months ago, I warned you about President Barack Obama’s EPA blending politics and science.

Now, according to an EPA news release issued Wednesday, the “blending” process appears to be complete:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today waived a limitation on selling fuel that is more than 10 percent ethanol for model year 2007 and newer cars and light trucks. The waiver applies to fuel that contains up to 15 percent ethanol – known as E15 – and only to model year 2007 and newer cars and light trucks. This represents the first of a number of actions that are needed from federal, state and industry towards commercialization of E15 gasoline blends. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson made the decision after a review of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) extensive testing and other available data on E15’s impact on engine durability and emissions.

What does that mean for American consumers accustomed to gasoline that already contains up to 10 percent ethanol? Plenty! In fact, the decision could do more harm than good, according to Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute.

In August, Gerard said this decision — made even before key safety and effectiveness studies have been completed — “could threaten vehicle performance and safety, void manufacturers’ warranties, confuse consumers – and create a public backlash against renewable fuels.”

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In an address to Green Mountain College on May 15, Carol Browner, Director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stated “The sooner the U.S. puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America…” In July, 2009, President Obama lauded the “Cash for Clunkers” program, stating that the initiative “gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil…” Unfortunately, our President is misinformed about carbon pollution.

The phrase “dangerous carbon pollution” has become standard propaganda from environmental groups. An example is a May, 2010 press release from the World Wildlife Fund that called for “a science-based limit on dangerous carbon pollution that will send a strong signal to the private sector.” Environmentalists have successfully painted a picture of black particle emissions into the atmosphere. This misconception is being used to drive efforts for Cap & Trade legislation, renewable energy, and every sort of restriction on our light bulbs, vehicles, and houses—all in the misguided attempt to stop climate change.

Carbon is integral to our skin, our muscles, our bones, and throughout the body of each person. Carbon forms more than 20% of the human body by weight. We are full of this “dangerous carbon pollution” by natural metabolic processes.

It’s true that incomplete combustion emits carbon particles that can cause smoke and smog. But this particulate carbon pollution is well controlled by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and many other federal and state statutes.

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