August 15, 2008

The EPA’s blueprint for disaster

By Phil Kerpen

Opponents of massive new energy taxes and regulations breathed a small sigh of relief in June when the Lieberman-Warner climate-tax bill went down in flames on the Senate floor. Even 10 Democrats broke with the party and voted against it, writing that they would have opposed the bill on final passage. Unfortunately, power-mad bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remain undaunted.

Worse than Lieberman-Warner

The EPA released in mid-July a document that blueprints a dizzying array of greenhouse-gas regulatory programs under dozens of different provisions of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The document, called an “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” will formally begin the process of implementing restrictions more draconian than those in the Lieberman-Warner bill—all without a single vote of Congress.

A 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA opened the door to this mischief, although that ruling was limited to motor-vehicle regulation. The EPA blueprint goes far beyond that. At more than 200 pages, along with an appendix of more than 800 pages, it is a radical plan for reordering the entire U.S. economy.

Not only would motor vehicles be regulated in the EPA’s new rules—and to a much greater degree than they are in new regulations coming from the Department of Transportation—so would light-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks, buses, motorcycles, planes, trains, ships, boats, tractors, mining equipment, RVs, lawn mowers, fork lifts, and just about every other piece of equipment that’s got a motor in it. The new regulations in many cases could require complete equipment redesigns and operational changes.

The EPA also hopes to regulate stationary-source emissions by instituting a cap-and-trade scheme much like the massive, multi-trillion-dollar, hidden-tax-hike scam the U.S. Senate rejected in June. If unable to do that, the EPA will deliver something even worse: old-style, command-and-control regulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

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