Breaking–Obama Dumps Key EPA Regulation

Everyone knows that you always dump your unwanted news on a Friday afternoon, and what better Friday afternoon to dump something you want to go away than the Friday before Labor Day.  A few hours ago Obama ordered the EPA to cancel its proposed new air quality regulations on ozone.  This is huge.  I’m on a deadline this afternoon so I don’t have time to work through it in detail right now, but suffice it to say for the time being that the proposed new ozone standard made no sense at all and was totally unnecessary.  But that hasn’t stopped the EPA juggernaut before (and they still have at least a half-dozen other new regulations in process).

The interesting thing to see now is how loudly environmentalists will scream about this (all the while, imagine how much louder if a Republican White House had done this), especially since it is coming from, as the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope keeps saying, “the best environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt.”  Also, let’s see how much media coverage it gets tonight and over the weekend.  Not much I expect, which is exactly what the White House wants.

Now back to the Keystone [cops] pipeline.

UPDATE: The AP story linked above does not say so, but apparently this is merely a delay in the rule, till 2013 (safely after re-election, in other words).  Even so, it is a huge retreat, and sometimes these delays result in a regulation being abandoned entirely, or rewritten in much different form.  The EPA, no doubt under White House orders, already delayed the “Boiler MACT” rules (don’t ask) a few weeks ago.  They’re circling the wagons.

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