Daniel Simmons
Institute for Energy Research
9/23/2011
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently filed a court brief in its ongoing litigation over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Amazingly, they are saying it would be absurd to follow the law. I’m not joking, as I will demonstrate below. The Institute for Energy Research (IER) has consistently opposed granting the federal government even further intervention into the operation of the economy and specifically of energy markets. Ironically, EPA’s own court documents are evidence of just how burdensome and unrealistic their stated objectives are, and why our opposition is sound.
The Context
In 2009, EPA had to decide whether or not greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide endanger public health and welfare and therefore needed to be regulated using the Clean Air Act. At the time, IER and other groups warned EPA that Congress never intended EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. We warned EPA that if they went forward, the Clean Air Act would require EPA to not only regulate large sources of carbon dioxide emissions, but also 260,000 office buildings, 150,000 warehouses, 100,000 schools, 92,000 health care facilities, 58,000 food service buildings, 37,000 churches, 26,000 places of public assembly, and 17,000 farms. IER argued that these regulations would be incredibly expensive, that the regulations would be required by law, and that Congress never intended to regulate greenhouse gases from these, or other sources, with the Clean Air Act…
…EPA is now in court because they deliberately violating the Clean Air Act.
They are asking the Court to allow them to implement the parts of the Act they want, and avoid the parts they know will cause political upheaval from sea to shining sea, proof that their decision to grant themselves more governmental powers was a political one. In the present post, we’ll concentrate on the sheer size and absurdity of the regulatory burdens of the EPA’s announced position, using the EPA’s own brief as our source…
Read the entire brief at the Institute for Energy.
H/T Refounders on Facebook.
