Erika Johnsen
HotAir
1/28/2013
The Environmental Protection Agency is getting taken to court left and right for their many overzealous regulations and intrusions into private industry, with varying results– but on Friday, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that, why no, the EPA may not punish the oil industry for their noncompliance with the EPA’s lofty Renewable Fuels Standard mandates in failing to blend a certain amount of cellulosic biofuels into their product, seeing as how those biofuels are not actually available…
…But the agency crosses the legal line when it tries to impose those standards — which are largely wish lists for future developments using technology that is not yet created — on industry, and inflict punishment when the goals aren’t met, the court ruled in American Petroleum Institute v. EPA.
“Do a good job, cellulosic fuel producers. If you fail, we’ll fine your customers,” the judges scolded in their ruling, in which they found the EPA’s pressure on refiners was an overreach of authority…
Read the complete article at HotAir.com
Related: EPA Email Scandal Is Worse than Originally Thought
…A pattern exists: the EPA creates a fake e-mail account for its administrator to avoid scrutiny; it doesn’t produce any of the fake e-mails even though they are required by law to do so; when specifically required by court order, the EPA seeks endless delays; and, when the delaying tactics prove fruitless, EPA fails to provide either the number or the type of e-mails required.
To put it simply, the agency is trying to run out the clock, hoping against hope that people will lose interest and move on to something else. This, in our judgment, must not be allowed to happen.
The point of this scheme was to evade public accountability, to conduct official government business under the table, outside of the public eye. When Congress and others asked for Ms. Jackson’s EPA correspondence and email, the “Richard Windsor” e-mails would fall outside that request and, eventually, be destroyed allowing official EPA business to be conducted secretly. That falls well short of conducting business in the open and in a transparent fashion. It also falls well short of the standards required by federal law…
Also, The spreading scandal at the EPA
A potentially major scandal is unfolding at the EPA, as the agency’s former head, Lisa Jackson, has been discovered to have used an email account under an alias for communication within her agency, evidently to avoid disclosure when FOIA requests ask to see her communications sent under her genuine name.,
See Chris Horner’s guest post “EPA Doubles Down on ‘Richard Windsor’ Stonewall” at Anthony Watts’ blog today, the PDF file for the inital 2100 ’emails’ is at this link: http://cei.org/sites/default/files/EPA_First_Jackson_FOIA_Production_1_14_2013.pdf
Do a screen search in that PDF file for the words American Thinker, and you see it appear 5 times among the “lisa jackson epa” Google Alert emails sent to the redacted “Administrator (b)(6)” recipient.
But did Ms Jackson ever bother to read ’em?
Meanwhile, in Europe, Wake-Up Call: A Disastrous Week for Carbon Trading at Der Spiegel
Oh noes! European Ponzie scheme crap-and-tax system rendered nearly meaningless!?!
