The EPA is Not Insane
The Obama White House is many things—flailing as it fishtails from an adult-in-the-room pose to screaming populism; cack-handed, as it both infuriates its base and loses independents; and passive to the point of paralysis, as Chris Christie pointed out in his Reagan Library speech.
The Obama White House, however, is not insane.
The Daily Caller’s breathtaking insistence, with a gratuitously crude reference to a TV wardrobe malfunction, that a what-if scenario painted in an EPA court brief (as an undesirable outcome) is a real proposal doesn’t have a whiff of plausibility.
The Daily Caller wants us to believe that EPA is about to nearly triple its budget and increase its regulatory staff by a factor of nearly 14 in order to slap millions of small businesses with greenhouse gas permit requirements. Right before an election year.
Not even the Obama political operation is that obtuse.
Here’s the background: EPA has proposed regulating greenhouse gas emissions from large stationary sources—power plants, refineries, and the like—using Clean Air Act authority that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that EPA has authority to use.
The rub, however, is that Clean Air Act permitting programs can apply to plants that emit as few as 100 tons per year of regulated pollutants. Since greenhouse gas emissions come out of every furnace exhaust and boiler stack, EPA recognized that imposing permit requirements on an estimated 6.1 million stationary sources would be beyond onerous. And, from an emissions reduction standpoint, beyond the law of diminishing returns, since 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from fixed sources come from a manageable set of big industrial operations.
Consequently, in tandem with proposing the emissions permitting rule, EPA proposed a "tailoring rule" to raise the permitting threshold to where only an estimated 14,700 big dogs would need the permits. Without the tailoring rule, EPA has acknowledged, state and local agencies that handle most Clean Air Act permitting chores would be overwhelmed. Not to mention the political resistance, which, it's safe to say, would rise to the level of a firestorm.
In a federal appeals court brief defending the tailoring rule, EPA estimated what it would take to write the permits if the tailoring rule were thrown out and the universe of permitees expanded more than 400-fold. That hypothetical - $21 billion to hire 230,000 permit writers – gave rise to the accusation that Lisa Jackson is about to unleash a swarm of red tape-happy bureaucrats on small businesses.
Even if the administration were bent on regulating every greenhouse gas source, from the biggest coal burning power plant to the smallest herd of ill-mannered flatulent cows, it wouldn't. Not a risk-averse White House that flinches as quickly from political pushback as the Obama White House does – witness the recent dropping of a proposed tightening of the ambient ozone limit.
Beyond that, the optics around an outlandish budget request for EPA would be as politically toxic as Rick Perry demanding the force-marching of every schoolgirl in America into an immunization clinic.
Which brings up another point that the Daily Caller didn't touch on. Even if the White House seriously proposed that EPA hire 230,000 permit-writers, all those bureaucrats wouldn't work for free. They would have to be paid through an appropriation. Only those who indulge in exotic smoking materials would believe a House majority and 60 senators would be up for throwing another $21 billion at EPA. Or that the White House would believe it could persuade Congress to go along.
The Daily Caller should leave creative journalism to a real pro – like Glenn Beck – and try to stick with boring old facts.
While it can be great fun to fill media echo chambers with gaseous rumors and speculations, such frolics are another sign of how a fractured—and often agenda driven—media has degraded public discourse on serious matters and needlessly polarized the American public.
