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Environmental Protection Agency
Domestic Axis of Evil
There is a human tendency to believe that all of the things one doesn’t like are in league or of a piece. That can lead to delusion and misapprehension. On the other hand, it sometimes turns out to be true. Take the case of the Inflation Reduction Act, which should better be known as the Inflation Promotion Act. This grotesque law is nothing but a grab-bag of payoffs to Democratic »
A bus too far
In a holiday weekend news dump this past Friday, the EPA promulgated a rule mandating the displacement of gas-powered trucks and buses with electric simulacra. The EPA gives its press release the unwieldy heading “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving.” If you want a picture of the future, imagine a »
The Spy Who Came in for the Gold
Ten years ago this month, “climate expert” John Beale, the EPA’s highest-paid employee, was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison. His crime was like something from Ian Fleming on LSD. [You can see Power Line’s coverage of this story from the time starting here.] In 1994, Beale told his EPA bosses he was actually a CIA spy working in London, India and Pakistan when he was actually kicking back »
EPA Tries to Destroy the Grid
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule limiting CO2 emissions from fossil fuel-fired (coal and natural gas) power plants. As you might expect, given the ideological bent of EPA, the rule is a Trojan horse, the real purpose of which is to induce the nation’s coal plants and some natural gas power generation to shut down under the increasing weight of federal regulations. Center of the American Experiment »
A time for charging
The Biden administration’s effort to impose electric vehicles on the car-buying public should at least be noted. It is taking place under power delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency by Congress under the regime of administrative law that controls so much of the way we live now. Forgive me for citing my own review “A new old regime.” Politico called on six reporters to celebrate the regulatory diktat intended to »
Roberts rules
Can the left amp up the hysteria past 11 to 12 or 13? The Supreme Court ruled against the EPA this morning in a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts. The case is West Virginia v. EPA. Politico offers this brief summary: The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Joe Biden’s climate strategy, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency has only limited authority to regulate carbon dioxide »
Environmentalists vs. Science
That is an evergreen headline; here is today’s instance. The Environmental Protection Agency has banned the use of the herbicide Enlist Duo in six Minnesota farm counties. Why? The chemicals in Enlist Duo are apparently harmful to the eastern massasauga rattlesnake. Only problem: there are no eastern massasauga rattlesnakes in those counties, and never have been. My colleague Tom Steward reports: The Environmental Protection Agency’s latest overreach in enforcing the »
Apocalypse never
Michael Shellenberger is author of the new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Quillette excerpted it in “Why I Believe Climate Change Is Not the End of the World.” Last month John Tierney reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal in “False Gods for Lost Souls.” Tierney writes: [Shellenberger] chronicles environmental progress around the world and crisply debunks myth after gloomy myth. No, we are not »
Pruitt blew it
That’s Ramesh Ponnuru’s assessment, and I agree with it. Ponnuru writes: EPA administrator Scott Pruitt had enemies who were out to get him because he is a Republican, a conservative, a high-ranking member of the Trump administration, and an environmental deregulator. But it wasn’t liberals, the media, or deep staters who made him get large raises for his top aides, deny that he knew about it, and then admit that »
Breaking: Scott Pruitt Out at EPA
The campaign against Scott Pruitt at EPA (more stories in the New York Times than it ran on the scarcity of women at Augusta a decade ago—clearly planned and planted by the environmental establishment) has finally borne fruit: Pruitt has resigned today. I haven’t kept up with the running list of Pruitt’s alleged and real mis-steps, but the best account I heard of his tenure as EPA administrator is that »
On the EPA: Stay on Target!
There’s an old saying that when you’re taking a lot of flak, you know you’re over the target. Right now this explains the liberal/media freakout about EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Pruitt is systematically dismantling the legacy of decades of egregious bureaucratic overreach by the EPA, including ending the corrupt “sue-and-settle” practice, stopping the practice of refusing to share raw data with outside researchers that bear on multi-hundred-billion dollar regulatory schemes, »
Scott Pruitt for Attorney General? Let’s hope not
Within limits, personnel churn in an administration has advantages. Removing poor performers or folks who resist the president’s agenda seems like a no-brainer. And when an outsider assumes the presidency with a shallow bench of supporters, we shouldn’t be surprised to see turnover early on. Churn doesn’t necessarily entail chaos, but it fosters uncertainty and intrigue. Accordingly to this story in the Washington Post by four — count them, four »
Feel Good Story of the Day
I recall talking once with Daniel Oliver about his experience as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronaldus Magnus, and especially how his greatest moment of satisfaction came when the Washington Post ran a “news” story about how he had “brought the commission to a standstill.” “All of my friends in other agencies called me to say, ‘Congratulations—how did you do it?'” Which brings us to this story »
Crying wolf at the EPA
There is no doubt that Scott Pruitt is shaking things up at the EPA. But are his changes being fairly characterized and reported? Not surprisingly the narrative has been driven by the liberal media, aided by disgruntled EPA officials who, having reached retirement age, are leaving the agency. Elizabeth Southerland, until recently the director of science and technology in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water, pronounced it her “civic »
Environmental justice under Trump
I have argued that “social justice” is a nonsensical term. Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when »
EPA Stiffs the People It Injured
We have written several times about the Gold King Mine disaster, one of the worst and most avoidable environmental incidents of recent years. Through sheer incompetence, the EPA and its contractor spilled three million gallons of toxic liquid into the Animas River in Colorado. The federal government turned the river orange: If a private citizen had done the same thing, he would have been criminally prosecuted. But being a government »