Category Archives: EPA

The Trump administration has formed a team charged with making recommendations for changes to the EPA. This action is needed because gone are the days when the EPA followed the legislation written by Congress.  Good things were accomplished by the EPA.  But now the EPA has over stepped it authority. The EPA task is to administer the law, not make it. For example, it has developed criteria to justify their own efforts, often invites “friendly lawsuits to expand their activities, and uses “secret science” to justify their regulations:

The following are some of the areas that the team need to address, in my opinion:

• Social Cost of Carbon
• Secret Science
• Peer Reviewed Studies
• Friendly Law Suits
• The Endangerment Finding
• Research Grants
• Last Minute Regulations

I posted about the EPA’s bad habit of using friendly law suits (also known as Sue and Settle) to get favorable court rulings which they wanted.   That posting follows:

Have you heard of the Sue and Settle scam often used by the EPA? Generally the idea is for the EPA to ask some non-government , big green organization to sue them regarding some piece of  legislation. The suit is settled by a consent decree where the EPA and the big environmental group achieved their shared goals. The court sets a deadline for comments from other interested parties that is so brief that no one can make meaningful comments in time to prevent legislation from becoming law.

In 2013, the US Chamber of Commerce (C of C) looked into the Sue and Settle issue posting “Sue and Settle—Regulating Behind Closed Doors”. One of the cases the posting examined is discussed in the following:

Regional Haze Implementation Rules

“EPA’s regional haze program, established decades ago by the Clean Air Act, seeks to remedy visibility impairment at federal national parks and wilderness areas. Because regional haze is an aesthetic requirement, and not a health standard, Congress emphasized that states—and not EPA—should decide which measures are most appropriate to address haze within their borders. Instead, EPA has relied on settlements in cases brought by environmental advocacy groups to usurp state authority and federally impose a strict new set of emissions controls costing 10 to 20 times more that the technology chosen by the states. Beginning in 2009, advocacy groups filed lawsuits against EPA alleging that the agency had failed to perform its nondiscretionary duty to act on state regional haze plans. In five separate consent decrees negotiated with the groups and, importantly, without notice to the states that would be affected, EPA agreed to commit itself to specific deadlines to act on the states’ plans. Next, on the eve of the deadlines it had agreed to, EPA determined that each of the state haze plans was in some way procedurally deficient. Because the deadlines did not give the states time to resubmit revised plans, EPA argued that it had no choice but to impose its preferred controls federally. EPA used sue and settle to reach into the state haze decision-making process and supplant the states as decision makers—despite the protections of state primacy built into the regional haze program by Congress.

As of 2012, the federal takeover of the states’ regional haze programs is projected to cost eight states an estimated $2.16 billion over and above what they had been prepared to spend on visibility improvements.”

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