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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Six taxpayers filed a lawsuit this week to invalidate an executive order issued by Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire. The taxpayers believe—with good reason—that the governor violated the doctrine of separation of powers by snatching a failed bill out of the legislative process and issuing it in the form of an executive order. They are being represented by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based government watchdog group.

Last year, after the Washington state legislature failed to pass a climate change bill championed by the governor, she took matters into her own hands by issuing an executive order directing the Departments of Ecology and Transportation to take action to reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions and increase transportation and fuel-conservation options. At a press conference, Gov. Gregoire stressed that the executive order was intended to replace her failed legislation. “What we’ve done in the executive order is everything that was in that final bill—plus. Plus. There’s more in the executive order than what was in the final bill that did not pass the Legislature,” she told reporters.

It gives one pause to consider that Governor Gregoire should record herself talking for vetting purposes prior to making such admissions in public.

There are strong parallels in this case to what is happening on a national scale. President Obama’s drilling ban end-run around the law, for example, which has signaled his administration’s strategy to push through certain policies notwithstanding any legal restrictions. Or the passage of the so-called “health care reform” bill, which was rammed through in a suspect reconciliation process designed to bypass opposition. Or the arguably abusive use of signing statements by President Bush to tell agencies to ignore certain provisions of bills he disagreed with—1,200 times. President Obama intends to continue the practice, though he claims he will “act with caution and restraint, based only on interpretations of the Constitution that are well-founded.” I’m sure we’ll all sleep  better at night.

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The media continue to report dismal economic news, raising the specter that our teetering economy may fall back into a “double-dip recession.” Continuing high unemployment is the biggest worry for most Americans. The percentage of working-age people in the labor force last month fell to 64.7 percent—the lowest figure in a quarter century.

You would think that the administration’s top priority, then, would be to foster a pro-investment, pro-hiring business atmosphere. You’d certainly not expect them to pursue policies that could push any impending recovery, fragile at best, over the “tipping point” and down into another economic chasm.

That, however, appears to be just what they’re doing.

The administration’s entire agenda—from “stimulus” spending, to government-run healthcare, to takeovers of financial institutions, to higher taxes—has spread paralyzing uncertainty throughout the investment community. But that hasn’t caused them even to slow down, let alone change course.

Consider three job-killing measures imposed by this administration in a single area: environmental regulation.

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The U.S. Chamber strongly supports efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, but we believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to achieve that goal.

The wrong way is through the EPA’s endangerment finding, which triggers Clean Air Act regulation. Because of the huge potential impact on jobs and local economies, this is an issue that requires careful analysis of all available data and options. Unfortunately, the agency failed to do that and instead overreached. The result is a flawed administrative finding that will lead to other poorly conceived regulations further downstream.

Today the Chamber is filing a formal petition indicating it will challenge EPA’s decision to trigger Clean Air Act regulation, based on lapses in EPA’s process in making that decision. The Chamber’s legal challenge will focus specifically on the inadequacies of the process that EPA followed in triggering Clean Air Act regulation, and not on scientific issues related to climate change or endangerment.

We continue to call for Congress to address climate change policy through the legislative process, rather than having EPA misapply environmental statutes like the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act that were not created to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Emphasis mine.

In addition to ignoring its own internal rules and working outside the legislative branch, the EPA is acting on a 2007 Supreme Court Ruling, which, based on new developments in the Climategate scandal, should be revisited. The ruling states the EPA was found to have the authority to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming and climate change. In addition, the Court stated:

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Today E&E News reports (subscription required) green group faux-rage that industry reps were consulted on drafting an amendment by Sen. Lisa Murkowski to (IMO, rather unwisely) grant the Democrats a one-year reprieve from their looming political nightmare of EPA threatening to actually try and regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources by regulation under a Clean Air Act never designed for such foolishness.

Such unseemly whimpering is about as credible as the greens’ phony “hacked emails!” outrage, over what was from all appearances a whistleblower releasing “ClimateGate” email evidence of dirty green tricks. These are the same crowd whose slimy green tactics include stealing my trash on a weekly basis and working with, e.g., the Guardian to dishonestly cobble together unrelated, out-of-context (unlike ClimateGate) excerpts from emails to paint a false picture. (“Greens involved in journalism process!”; sadly, the Guardian never called me for their “story” about, well, me, so I must confess I wasn’t involved).

Specifically, E&E notes how:

“the Washington Post reported yesterday that [Bracewell & Giuliani's Jeff Holmstead] and another former EPA official, Roger Martella, ‘helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall.’…

Environmentalists pounced on the reports as evidence that coal and oil interests are behind Murkowski’s efforts. ‘We now have proof that lobbyists for Big Oil, dirty coal and other special interests are directly involved in recent attempts to bail out big polluters and gut the Clean Air Act,’ said a Sierra Club press release. ‘What’s more, these big polluter lobbyists are the same former Bush administration officials who completely disregarded the Clean Air Act and even disobeyed the Supreme Court for years.’

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What is Cap-and-Trade? Cap-and-Trade is a political scheme ostensibly aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of reducing the global temperatures.

With a Cap-and-Trade law in place, the government would set a yearly greenhouse gas emission target (carbon dioxide is the most common man-made greenhouse gas, you are exhaling right it now) and would reduce that yearly ceiling over time.  This is the “Cap” of Cap-and-Trade.

The “Trade” part of this scheme comes in when the government (read: politicians) gives out greenhouse gas emission credits, valued at billions of dollars, to favored industries.  So, industries with greater credits than emissions would be able to sell their valuable credits (basically, a right to emit greenhouse gases) to those industries (such as the coal industry or the oil and gas industries) which would need the credits to stay in business.

Over time, the government makes money, commodities traders make money, such as those on the Chicago Climate Exchange (yes, it exists, they make money trading carbon dioxide credits), politically favored industries make money (such as those former Vice President Al Gore has invested over $100 million in), and the rest of us get hit with the bill – up to $2,000 per family per year of higher energy costs. Thus, Cap-and-Trade is actually a huge energy tax on working Americans.

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