EPA’s assault on science and state sovereignty
If you haven’t seen the latest ALEC report on the EPA, it’s time to head on over to their website, download the report, and read it. This is (or should be) essential reading for anyone in the energy sector, transportation, policy … well … pretty much anybody who is impacted by EPA regulations. (Which means all of you out there.)
Obama’s recently released climate change initiative calls for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to unleash yet another energy regulation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases from existing power plants, severely threatening the generation of affordable and reliable energy. This is only one piece of an unprecedented EPA regulatory assault unleashed in the past few years as detailed by ALEC’s latest report,The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Assault on State Sovereignty.
Be sure to check out their blog post on the report finding as well.
Not surprisingly, much of what the EPA is doing is based on a cockeyed interpretation of “linear no threshold” modeling, which is now essentially pushing – forcing may be a more accurate term – American industry to lower many emissions from industrial activity to near natural background levels. As a 2012 Texas Public Policy Foundation report explains, the EPA’s push is based on “selective, highly uncertain science, driven by implausible assumptions,” but damn the job losses, community closures, or economic and social impacts, they’re moving forward with their questionable science and massive new regulatory scheme anyway.
After dramatic improvement in air quality and ever-stricter federal air quality standards now approaching natural back ground levels, the EPA, in order to justify more stringent regulation, recently devised a method to create a vast reservoir of new health risks. Under the cloak of selective, highly uncertain science driven by implausible assumptions, the EPA now declares that additional regulations are necessary to save thousands of lives. The EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s inflammatory claims regularly deceive the public. On “Real Time with Bill Maher,” she grimly warned that, “We are actually at the point in many areas of the country … the best advice is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air. It might kill you.” In similarly hyperbolic vein, she told a congressional committee: “If we could reduce particulate matter [pollution] to levels that are healthy, it would have identical impacts to finding a cure for cancer.” This astounding assertion by the head of the EPA demands meaningful explanation. In recent years, cancer has caused the deaths of approximately 600,000 people per year.
To help our readers and members better understand the nature of the EPA’s outlandish claims, we have invited Dr. Michael Honeycutt, Director – Toxicology Division at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to speak at the ACC’s 2013 Coal Market Strategies Conference (Ritz Carlton Lake Tahoe, August 19-21). Dr. Honeycutt presentation will describe how the EPA has founded much of their recent regulatory push on a misuse of linear no threshold modeling and miscalculations of the health benefits and impacts related to ambient particulate matter concentrations.
Those interested in gaining a better understanding of this issue should get registered for the 2013 Coal Market Strategies conference and should also download the ALEC report “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Assault on State Sovereignty“, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s report “EPA’s Pretense of Science: Regulating Phantom Risks.”