By Timothy Birdnow ——Bio and Archives--April 21, 2014
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"The Constitution specifies that the Executive Branch has no authority to engage in lawmaking, but must faithfully execute the laws as written – and not as regulators might wish the laws had been written, to advance their preferred policy agendas. EPA has violated these most fundamental rules, ignoring inconvenient statutory language, and devising and enforcing other provisions out of whole cloth. Between 1989 and 2010, Congress considered and rejected some 692 bills addressing various aspects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. So President Obama’s EPA simply imposed carbon dioxide controls by executive fiat, using “prevention of significant deterioration” and “new source performance standards” to create new authority over coal-fired electrical generating plants. It then unilaterally changed precise statutory emission standards from 250 tons per year to 100,000 tpy – to avoid the public backlash that would come if it began regulating and shutting down all the natural gas generators, refineries, cement kilns, factories, paper mills, shopping malls, apartment and office buildings, hospitals, schools and even large homes that emit more than 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Those job-killing rules can come later, when radical environmentalists sue radical regulators, to enforce the statutory requirement."
"While Congress mandated the EPA establish cooling water standards in 1972, Riverkeeper and other groups sued the EPA in 1993 and obtained a consent decree in 1995, requiring EPA to issue a 316(b) rule in 1999. The consent decree was later amended to allow the EPA to issue the rule in three phases: Phase I (new plants) was finalized in 2001 and a portion of Phase III (new offshore and coastal oil rigs) was finalized in 2006; Phase II (large existing power plants) and the remainder of Phase III (small power plants and manufacturing facilities) were issued in 2004 and 2006, respectively, but were remanded by courts in 2009 and 2010. In April 2011, the agency proposed new standards that could allow all facilities above a minimum size to install safeguards against the impingement of aquatic life. The proposal allows state officials to decide on a case-by-case basis—based on site-specific analysis—whether closed-cycle cooling systems and other technologies are required. The April 2011 proposal combines Phase II and III into one rule and covers roughly 1,260 existing facilities—670 power plants—each of which withdraws at least 2 million gallons per day of cooling water."So the EPA has known this was coming since 2006, yet failed to meet the court-ordered deadline of the agreement. Now the groups are free to re-litigate, or the EPA will be forced to issue draconian rules to satisfy them - and provide cover for Tailgunner Gina McCarthy and her boss Barack Obama. This is another in a long line of dirty tricks, and the end purpose is to further the ambition to reduce America's energy consumption. Energy is a measure of wealth, and with less of it America is brought down to the level of those nations that are poorer than we are. That people will be thrown out of work, that elderly folks will die from hot summers and cold winters, that all Americans will find it difficult to pay the increased costs of energy, is immaterial. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, after all!
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Timothy Birdnow is a conservative writer and blogger and lives in St. Louis Missouri. His work has appeared in many popular conservative publications including but not limited to The American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Intellectual Conservative and Orthodoxy Today. Tim is a featured contributor to American Daily Reviewand has appeared as a Guest Host on the Heading Right Radio Network. Tim’s website is tbirdnow.mee.nu.