Too much government control negatively affects the people

October 22, 2024

We have all probably noticed that over the last few decades, and likely almost as long as the country has existed, the federal government has been growing and has gotten much bigger, much more powerful, and mind-bogglingly expensive.

While the addition of new government departments, agencies, offices, etc., and their increases in size, may have been intended to improve government functioning, and were done for the best of reasons, that has often not been the result.

While the elements of government are constitutionally under the control of the administration and Congress, that leadership changes fairly often, and with those changes come different ideas about how government should work. But most of the personnel in the various administrative departments and agencies stay in their positions for years or decades, and while they are there they develop their own ideas about how their part of government should work.

These concepts frequently are at odds with what is expected by the people, and what best serves their interests. As a result, terms like “deep state” and “administrative state” have arisen to describe them.

Complaints about this troubling problem are not unusual, and quite often highlight true problems caused by a particular area of government. But the complaints quite often fall on deaf ears, or do not have needed support to change things. A recent correspondence from the CEO of a South Carolina electric cooperative to its customers is a good example.

Palmetto Electric Cooperative President and CEO, A. Berl Davis Jr., identified and explained one such problem brought on by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Davis began by discussing referees in a football game, who he said often operate as if they are more important than the game itself. “I think of the Environmental Protection Agency the same way,” he wrote. “The role they fill is a critical one, but their recent set of regulations on power plants is a bad call. Unfortunately, the consequences will be much worse than merely losing a ballgame. The EPA’s latest interference in the energy industry threatens our access to reliable, affordable electricity. It’s one more reason our cooperative’s energy costs are rising, along with inflation and the increasing price of wholesale power from one of our primary power sources, Santee Cooper.”

EPA’s recent rule aimed at existing coal and new natural gas power plants requires them to either greatly reduce their output or install carbon capture and storage. “In theory, carbon capture and storage, or CCS, might sound like a neat idea. A power plant’s carbon emissions could be injected deep underground rather than released into the atmosphere,” Davis wrote. “But in practice, CCS is unproven and unbelievably expensive. No utility in the country has successfully pulled off CCS at the level the EPA is requiring for America’s fleet of power plants.”

This action’s expense results in higher prices for consumers, and also puts power suppliers in a crisis. As he explains it, “South Carolina urgently needs more power supply, not greater restrictions on our existing power plants or the ones our state needs to build. Our state has already struggled to supply sufficient electricity during the coldest hours of the winter, such as when freezing weather led to rolling blackouts in parts of South Carolina during Christmas 2022. And South Carolina’s power needs are only increasing amid the state’s rapid population and economic growth.”

Some help can come from solar farms, he notes, but also recognizing that solar power is not always there when it is needed, like on cold winter mornings and at night when the sun isn’t shining.

“To keep up, we will need to be able to rely on 24/7 energy sources including natural gas and, at least for now, coal. Yet the EPA seems intent on throwing its yellow flag and ejecting those reliable power plants from the game,” Davis wrote. “The job of keeping the lights on is hard enough during a challenging time for the energy industry. We don’t need the government making it any harder or more expensive for you.” And this problem affects other states, too.

He said further that Palmetto Electric Cooperative is joining other organizations to fight the EPA’s dangerous rules in court and in the Congress.

Decisions like this one are made by bureaucrats in government offices, not by the one law-making body that we have: Congress. Where the environment is concerned, decisions like this one are often the result of political positions and ideals, not on actual problems and needs, and the effects they will have on the people that the bureaucrats exist to properly serve.

The “administrative state” must be brought under control. Our government needs to be reduced in its degree of control, its size and its cost. Its focus must be restored so that it works for the good of all of the people, not just the political faction that most government employees favor, whatever that may be.

In the election next month there is the opportunity to do one of two things: either continue the current trend and increase the size, cost and control of government by electing radical Democrat liberals/socialists, or say a loud “no” to that.

Clean Water Rule gets its long overdue and well-deserved repeal

President Donald Trump began an effort to relieve the country of an unnecessary and harmful regulation by signing an executive order in February of 2017. The order began the roll-back of the Clean Water Rule put in place by the Obama administration in 2015. The Rule was a regulation published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Army Corps of Engineers to clarify water resource management in the United States under a provision of the Clean Water Act of 1972. 

That action to repeal the Rule has now been finalized. It has been termed a major win for the rule of law, property rights, and the environment. It was heavily criticized for making it difficult for people to farm or even build a home on their own property.

What it did was to alter the meaning of the phrase “waters of the United States” — those waters under the control of the federal government — to include waters so small that they couldn’t even be seen by the naked eye.

Here is the way the American Farm Bureau Federation explained things: “…distant regulators using ‘desktop tools’ can conclusively establish the presence of a ‘tributary’ on private lands, even where the human eye can’t see water or any physical channel or evidence of water flow. 

“That’s right — invisible tributaries! 

“The agencies even claim ‘tributaries’ exist where remote sensing and other desktop tools indicate a prior existence of bed, banks, and [ordinary high-water marks], where these features are no longer present on the landscape today.”

That definition of what regulated “waters” were literally made it impossible for property owners to know what on their property is or might be covered by the Rule, but subjected them to heavy civil and/or criminal penalties for breaking the Rule.

It would therefore have been possible for dry land that holds water for a few days after heavy rain to be ruled a “water” under the Rule. That meant a mud puddle could have fallen under federal control.

The result was that some perfectly good lands were judged improper for projects their owners intended to use them for, and in the worst cases, land owners were punished for what were otherwise normal, acceptable land uses.

The vagueness of the rule, and thus the danger it imposed on property owners who want to use their property for their chosen purposes, such as to farm it or to develop it, was substantial enough to have drawn criticism from then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy back in 2016: “[T]he Clean Water Act is unique in both being quite vague in its reach, arguably unconstitutionally vague, and certainly harsh in the civil and criminal sanctions it puts into practice.”

Its reach also encroached on states’ rights, the ability of the individual states to have much to say about properties within their own borders, an important element of the restrictions imposed on the federal government by the U.S. Constitution.

Such examples of overreaching by the federal government are not difficult to find. They have been growing, as legislators have enacted overreaching laws, and bureaucrats have implemented regulations with the force of law. All of which puts regular citizens at risk of breaking one of the thousands of federal no-nos.

On that topic, Townhall.com said the following in 2016: “There are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws, with 10,000-300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. In fact, our entire criminal code has become a leviathan unto itself. In 2003, there were only 4,000 offenses that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21 percent to 4,850. The code has become so big, that the Congressional Research Service and the American Bar Association simply do not have enough staff to adequately categorize every law we have on the books.”

This information becomes even more important when considering what might happen after November of 2020 when the nation elects its president for the next four years.

This land, built on the principals of personal freedoms and limited government, has already seen exponential growth in the size and reach of the federal government. The more laws, regulations and rules we have on the books, the less freedom the people have. The number of decrees is unfathomably large and therefore the average person, or even those knowledgeable about laws, cannot possibly know everything for which we citizens can be criminally or civilly punished.

While President Trump believes in removing regulations that needlessly or improperly interfere with normal activities — like the Clean Water Rule — and reducing taxes that allow Americans to keep more of their hard-earned income, the socialistic promises offered by Democrat hopefuls will do a sharp 180 on both of those things.

With a compliant Congress and like-thinking, over-zealous bureaucrats, if one of the more radical folks running for the Democrat nomination gets elected, they could initiate scores of new mandates and prohibitions, further limiting the freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

Robert Francis “Beto” O'Rourke gave a hint to the thinking of some of these people: “Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47."

This is precisely the opposite of the attitude we need in the White House.

Draining the swamp: restoring proper operation to federal agencies

It is a difficult task trying to determine which federal agency has done the most damage to the country and its citizens. A very strong candidate for this dishonor, if not a shoo-in for it, is the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.

The EPA’s sins run from declaring mud puddles on private property to be under federal control through the Waters of the United States rule to picking winners and losers and deciding to shut down an entire industry based upon a manic fear of CO2, a compound that is essential for animal and plant life.

A good rule for all of us to remember is, “all things in moderation.” If that is a good rule for CO2, as the EPA asserts, it is also a necessary rule for regulations. Too many regulations really gum things up, stunt our economy, punish taxpayers and businesses, create uncertainty, and the EPA may well be the king in that regard, although the IRS is a strong contender.

President Donald Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has been charged with corralling that agency, and he sat down with The Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey at Heritage’s President’s Club meeting to discuss that process.

First up, the topic of “sue and settle” and how that process amounts to backdoor rulemaking.  An article on Forbes online describes the process as follows: “’Sue and Settle’ practices, sometimes referred to as ‘friendly lawsuits,’ are cozy deals through which far-left radical environmental groups file lawsuits against federal agencies wherein court-ordered ‘consent decrees’ are issued based upon a prearranged settlement agreement they collaboratively craft together in advance behind closed doors.” Read that again, carefully.

“Then, rather than allowing the entire process to play out, the agency being sued settles the lawsuit by agreeing to move forward with the requested action they and the litigants both want.”

Pruitt noted an additional irregularity. “But then here’s the kicker: They (the agency) would pay attorneys fees to the group that sued them.” So the group is effectively making “comfortable” rules and the government pays for their lawyers.

Acknowledging the fraudulent nature and duplicity of this process, Pruitt said, “My job is to enforce the laws as passed by whom? Congress. They give me my authority. That’s the jurisdictional responsibilities that I have, and when litigation is used to regulate … that’s abusive. That’s wrong.”

A bit later Bluey asked about the Waters of the United States rule. “[P]eople all over the country have no idea today where federal jurisdiction begins and ends under that 2015 rule,” Pruitt responded. He was in Salt Lake City with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and an Army Corps of Engineers representative about two months ago when the representative pointed to a thermal drainage ditch and said, “Scott, that is a water of the United States.”

“It’s not going to be anymore,” Pruitt said. “That’s really the challenge here—that you had so much confusion and uncertainty about what waters were in [and] what waters were out.”

Next, Bluey turned to the Clean Power Plan, asking Pruitt where he sees the EPA going with this regulation.

“It’s not the job of the EPA to say to the utility company in any state of the country, you should choose renewables over natural gas or coal,” he answered. “We need fuel diversity in the general electricity. We need more choices, not less.”

And then the common sense answer that has been absent for eight or more years: “No agency at the federal level should use their coercive power to force business utility companies to take those fuel sources away. They should be making it on cost, stability, and I would say resiliency of the grid.”

Hallelujah!

Turning to the day-to-day operation of the agency, Pruitt talked about the advisory bodies that provide input into decisions and policy. “The scientists who make up these bodies, and there are dozens and dozens of these folks, over the years those individuals as they’ve served those capacities, guess what has also happened? They’ve received moneys through grants, and sometimes substantial moneys through grants,” he said.

“I think what’s most important at the agencies,” he continued, “is to have scientific advisers who are objective, independent minded, providing transparent recommendations to me as the administrator and to our office on the decisions that we’re making on the efficacy of rules that we’re passing to address environmental issues.

“If we have individuals that are on those boards that are receiving money from the agency, sometimes going back years and years to the tune of literally tens of millions of dollars, over time,” he said, “that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity of the transparency of the recommendations that are coming our way.”

This pro-Constitution, commonsense rule of law perspective is one that all heads of federal agencies ought to share, and what the concept of constitutional government demands.

After many years of bureaucratic excesses, frequently spurred by political bias, it is refreshing and it inspires confidence to see Scott Pruitt and other administration officials at last focusing on proper management of the government we pay for, but which has so often gone off the rails into ideological self-service.

After eight years, Obama’s Energy Secretary visits West Virginia

Those who lived in or near the southern West Virginia and/or southwest Virginia coalfields during the peak of the coal business in the 50s and 60s know that state and local economies thrived because of the tens of thousands of people employed by mining companies and the dozens of companies that supported the industry.

Bluefield, WV’s Norfolk and Western Railway yard was always filled with coal cars, many of them full of the world’s most widely used fossil fuel, that were bound for Norfolk, VA’s port, or ready to be unloaded into trucks for delivery. The rest were empty, heading back into the coalfields to be refilled and brought back for distribution.

They remember the bustling downtown that was the financial, shopping and recreational center of the region’s coalfields, and Bluefield’s population of well over 20,000 residents during the time of peak coal. These are valued memories of the good times.

Today’s population is half that size, and the rail yard is often empty. To those who have seen first-hand the decline of the industry and its effects on local communities, the industry’s decline is a very real and painful thing.

The decline began with natural technological advances, as mechanization gradually began putting hundreds of miners out of work. Over time other forces developed, affecting the industry, including the very recent rise of cheap natural gas. Through all of that, there was always a market for coal.

But the federal government’s assault on coal through excessive environmental regulation, spurred by the hotly debated idea that burning coal pours too much carbon dioxide – a gas essential for life on Earth – into the atmosphere, is the greatest problem. President Barack Obama put this attack into high gear. However, today our air is cleaner than it’s been for 100 years, mostly through evolving technological improvements.

Cloistered away in their comfortable offices in Washington, DC, our public servants frequently have no idea what life is like for those toiling away to pay the taxes that fund their salaries. Perhaps if they got out of Washington more, they would understand the problems they create for the people they serve.

This may be the case with Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who at the invitation of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally visited the state after many invitations over the eight painful years of the Obama administration. But while in the state last week, Moniz suggested there is no war on coal, arguing to the contrary that the Obama administration is working to keep coal as an important part of a low-carbon energy future. He also said that cheap natural gas prices are primarily responsible for coal’s downturn.

The absurd idea that there is no “War on Coal” today would be hilarious, if the reality wasn’t so tragic, and the suggestion that the very recent drop in natural gas prices is the principal reason for coal’s decline is simply false.

This general situation was foretold by Barack Obama back in the 2008 campaign: “So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” Obama declared.

Assuming that Moniz has the capacity to recognize the misery the administration for which he works has caused for this region, or really cares about the people affected by its policies, visiting West Virginia much earlier in the administration’s tenure might have made some difference.

Hillary Clinton is on that same path. While campaigning in Ohio earlier this year, she said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Trying to make that sound better, she said she favored funding to retrain those put out of work, but she didn’t say what kind of jobs and how many of them are currently waiting for trained workers.

Not long thereafter, while campaigning in West Virginia, she was asked about that comment by a tearful out-of-work coal miner, to which she responded that what she meant was that coal job losses will continue, according to the Daily Caller. See the difference?

Obama’s energy policy is like putting a square peg in a round hole. If you want to put a square peg in a round hole, take some time and think it through: You should gradually and gently reshape the square peg so it will comfortably and appropriately fit into the round hole. Obama’s method is to place the peg on top of the hole and beat it with a hammer until enough of the corners are destroyed so that the peg will go into the hole. And even then, it is a poor fit.

Just as horse-drawn wagons and carriages gave way to motorized vehicles when they came to be, coal’s role as a primary fuel would have changed as better methods evolved. Such a process would have been not only more humane and less destructive, but infinitely smarter than what has transpired.

Through the centuries humans solved life’s problems and improved their lives through applied intelligence. Somehow, they managed to do this without Barack Obama and the EPA.

Strong resistance to federal overreach is overdue, but growing

For four years, an organic farmer in Indiana was harassed when he supplied raw milk to the local organic co-ops. What prompted this action was what the Goshen News reported in 2010 as an outbreak of campylobacter bacterial infections “that might be traceable to the Forest Grove Dairy.”

Obviously, if bad milk makes people sick, health departments need to be involved, however, farm owner David Hochstetler told the paper at the time that health departments had not visited the farm to investigate, and he was never found to have sold bad milk.

Despite never having his product tied to the outbreak, Hochstetler’s farm was subjected to frequent inspections and harassment by two federal agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Justice, actions believed to be aimed at closing down the dairy farm. And then Elkhart County Sheriff David Rogers responded to Hochstetler’s complaint, realized there was no justification for such harassment, and stepped in and blocked this over-reach from the federal government.

Rogers wrote to the DOJ telling them he would take action, including “removal or arrest” of federal agents, if the inspectors came without a signed warrant specifying probable cause and giving a clear reason justifying their invasive searches.

Rogers explained in the local newspaper, “My research concluded that no one was getting sick from this distribution of this raw milk. It appeared to be harassment by the FDA and the DOJ, and making unconstitutional searches, in my opinion. The farmer told me that he no longer wished to cooperate with the inspections of his property.”

You may be wondering why federal agencies were involved in what clearly was a local/state issue. This is not unusual.

The Daily Caller reported a year ago on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Waters of the United States rule that critics say “would allow the agency to regulate waterways previously not under federal jurisdiction, including puddles, ditches and isolated wetlands.”

The EPA may be the agency that has done the most damage to the U.S. economy and business operations with its over-zealous and intrusive mandates, concerning such things as incandescent light bulbs, toilets that use “too much” water, limiting wood burning and charcoal use, and now extending its tentacles to regulating temporary water collections on private property.

Many states are growing tired of these overreaches. A bill introduced in the Indiana State Legislature reflects that state’s frustration. The bill nullifies all of the EPA’s regulations and places all environmental protection authority with the state’s Department of Environmental Management. And 24 states, including Indiana, have filed a lawsuit in federal court to strike down the new source performance standards affecting new coal burning power plants.

The EPA’s costly excesses and other excessive behaviors by administrative agencies trample all over the plain language the Founders deliberately wrote into the U.S. Constitution through the Tenth Amendment, which states: “The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

However, it is the wont of federal bureaucracies to grow like weeds, often with the tacit approval of our elected representatives in Congress, and not infrequently at their behest. Bureaucrats isolate themselves into protected enclaves extending their reach beyond that which is appropriate. They often do serious harm to their bosses, the American people, usually without accountability for their misdeeds.

Having escaped the heavy hand of King George only a few years before, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution sought to create a document establishing a new government for the United States that could not evolve to be as oppressive as Mother England had been; a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It was no accident that the phrase “the people” is mentioned five times in the Bill of Rights.

The Legal Information Institute of the Cornell University Law School explains: “The U.S. Constitution grants the federal government with power over issues of national concern, while the state governments, generally, have jurisdiction over issues of domestic concern. While the federal government can enact laws governing the entire country, its powers are enumerated, or limited; it only has the specific powers allotted to it in the Constitution.”

Some constitutional scholars and experts have described the Tenth Amendment as the Bill of Rights’ “catch-all” amendment, a strong reminder to federal lawmakers and officials that the federal government has strict limits, and everything outside those limits is under the control of the states.

The checks and balances of our governmental system give Congress the duty and the authority to oppose excessive behavior by the executive branch. The federal budget is an excellent tool for this purpose. It is shameful that these elected representatives have so often and for so long failed to protect their own Constitutional authority and, more importantly, the best interests of the people they were elected and sworn to represent.

The failure of Congress to oppose over-zealous federal agencies means the states have no other choice but to strongly oppose the unconstitutional federal intrusions, either through legal action, or by actions like that of Sheriff Rogers.

Here’s the other side of the argument: Appreciating fossil fuels

Predictions of horrible things happening if we continue burning fossil fuels are fairly common these days. Man is killing the Earth by continuing to use fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – to power electricity generation, make motor vehicles go, and now even to cook your dinner outside on the grill.

This compulsive thinking has driven the Environmental Protection Agency to dictate that the nation reduce the 2005 level of carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, despite that doing so will cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars, all to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by one-tenth of a percent.

Almost no one argues that global warming isn’t a reality. However, the current period of global warming has taken a timeout for well more than a decade. Most people know that for thousands of years there have been alternating periods of warming and cooling on the Earth. The important question is, however, whether the low level of recent warming is significant, and more to the point, whether or not the actions of human beings contribute significantly to the slight warming period that is now on hold.

The carbon-mania gripping environmental scaremongers in the U.S. ignores the plain fact that compared to China and India, among others, the U.S. is by far a minor contributor of carbon emissions.

Two things have been forgotten – or perhaps conveniently covered up. One is the long list of predicted global catastrophes that have not come to pass. The other is how much better the lives of human beings are because we have learned how to use fossil fuels to make our lives better.

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013 “Historical Data Workbook,” 87 percent of the energy mankind uses every second comes from burning one of those fossil fuels.

People who live in cold climates use fossil fuels to warm their homes, and people who live in warm climates use fossil fuels to cool their homes. Fossil fuels are used to plant and harvest crops that feed people, and are used to transport food from places where food is produced to places where it is needed and wanted. Fossil fuels are used to light the darkness, to entertain us, transport us, diagnose disease, communicate with each other, mass-produce products we need and want, and to provide security in our homes and for the nation.

And we also do not hear how much better the lives of the poorest people living in the direst conditions on Earth could be if we were helping them to use fossil fuels to their benefit the way the developed world does.

Technology enables us to modify the way we use fossil fuels to control our climate to our advantage, and to progressively improve the way we use fossil fuels to do less harm. Because of technological advances our air today is much cleaner than it was a hundred years ago. Technology not only provides many wonderful assets for us, but also improves itself, so that these crucial technologies now cause little harm to the environment.

Imagine where the world would be today if we had never learned to use fossil fuels and to develop those technologies for our benefit. Imagine what would happen if suddenly all of the facilities that burn fossil fuels for electricity production and for other purposes just simply stopped doing so for several weeks.

And perhaps that is what is needed to get the American people to open up to the truth that using fossil fuels not only is good for us, but also is not harmful to the environment to a significant degree.

A major fallacy in the war against fossil fuels is the belief that they are harmful because they are dirty, and “natural” sources of energy like wind and solar power are not harmful because they are not dirty. But both wind power and solar power also have their negative side, in addition to not being capable of replacing fossil fuels any time in the foreseeable future.

The rare Earth elements needed for wind turbines, for example, can be acquired only through an enormous and complex mining process to find and excavate them. And that mining process requires machinery driven by fossil fuels.

Establishing a wind farm on a mountaintop requires a great deal of clearing of wooded lands and the building of roads for access and towers for transmission lines. Enormous solar farms both substantially warm the acres of land beneath them and attract and kill birds.

Many leading environmentalists, including those who predict fossil fuel catastrophe, hold as their most important value what they call “pristine” nature or wilderness nature unaltered by man. They see humans as a plague upon the Earth.

Alex Epstein, author of the excellent book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, holds human life as his most important value. When you accept that human life is the most important consideration, then small infringements on nature and the environment that yield great advances and benefits for humans are perfectly acceptable.

That is the sensible way to look at it. That is the human way to look at it.

Going Rogue, Part XI: EPA will break the law to do what is right!

The Environmental Protection Agency, long behaving as a narrowly focused ideological organization instead of as a servant of the people, may finally have messed up sufficiently to bring itself down, or at the very least to have earned a significant degree of restriction to its slash-and-burn approach to fossil fuel energy production.

Causing misery to thousands of honest, hard-working people who have lost jobs and businesses, suffered downturns in their business and/or paid heavy fines because of the agency’s dogmatic focus on imposing unwarranted restrictions on behaviors the agency dislikes, the EPA has been caught in an incestuous relationship with organizations that advocate the same ideology as agency bureaucrats.

The work of the Environment & Energy Legal Institute (EELI) reveals that the EPA has secretly colluded with environmental activists to drive the Obama administration’s manic global warming agenda. The organization’s report reveals “records showing illegal activities by EPA staff, conspiring with certain environmental group lobbyists to draft EPA’s greenhouse gas rules behind the scenes and outside of public view.”

As reported by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Michael Bastasch, who quoted Chris Horner, an EELI senior attorney, “These emails, which EPA forced us to litigate to obtain, prove beyond any doubt that EPA conducted its campaign to impose the global warming agenda unlawfully, making the rules themselves unlawful.” Mr. Horner says the EPA’s rules were made in collusion with environmental groups, including the radical Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), thereby excluding the public from the process, and are therefore unlawful.

EELI says the EPA wrote the Clean Power Plan and other agency rules with an “unalterably closed mind” centered on an anti-fossil fuel agenda. The EPA’s behavior and the NRDC’s perspective perfectly fit the dictionary definition of the ideologue: an impractical idealist, an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology.

A 2014 EELI report focused on emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request that showed coordination between EPA employees and environmentalists that discussed the Keystone XL pipeline and clean coal technology. The EELI asserts that the records show “the influence on EPA by pressure groups, the same groups from which EPA obtained numerous senior officials,” and that these activists helped to craft the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) that regulates carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

The New York Times found similar connections last year: “Indisputable, however, is that the Natural Resources Defense Council was far ahead of the E.P.A. in drafting the architecture of the proposed regulation.”

Analyzing the EPA’s strategy, Mr. Horner commented: “The issue is solely whether Congress will stop EPA from unlawfully winning by losing, which is to say, using sham rulemaking to metastasize its desired harms before the typical timeline of litigation allows for intervention. The public needs to consider this illegality and cynical lawlessness when the President stands up with the EPA administrator … to lecture us all about how they’re just doing the right thing.”

Question: If the EPA and the Obama administration are doing the right thing, why did they feel compelled to break the law?

The EPA is expected to finalize the CPP this week, and may already have done so by now. According to comments from the White House, this new version of the plan is even stronger than last year’s proposal, which was objectionable enough to prompt several states to file suit opposing the rule, and to outrage some labor unions.

Even before this stronger version of the plan had been developed, United Mine Workers of America president Cecil Roberts said the CPP would result in tens of thousands of union members losing their jobs. Doing the right thing “will lead to long-term and irreversible job losses for thousands of coal miners, electrical workers, utility workers, boilermakers, railroad workers and others without achieving any significant reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions,” Mr. Roberts said in a statement. In addition to the thousands who have already lost their jobs, he estimates that the rule will cause 75,000 job losses in the coal sector by 2020, rising to 152,000 by 2035.

Apparently unconcerned with the thousands of American workers whose lives will be turned upside-down, an EPA spokesperson said, “The Clean Power Plan follows our clear legal authority under the Clean Air Act,” adding that, “The supreme court has decided multiple times that EPA has an obligation to regulate greenhouse gases,” without apparent concern for the repercussions.

The EPA, like all federal agencies, is duty-bound to enthusiastically adhere to only one ideology, and that is the one outlined by the U.S. Constitution.

The EPA, or any federal agency, may properly seek input from any individual or organization, but they may not take information or advice exclusively from one side without providing the opportunity for opposing points of view and data to be provided, and to objectively consider all points of view to arrive at a fair and sensible conclusion.

Out of control actions by agencies of the federal government are much too frequent, and repercussions for this inappropriate, intolerable and sometimes-illegal behavior are nearly non-existent. A number of people should be fired, and a few deserve to be indicted.

Don’t hold your breath!

Scientists demonstrate more fallacies of “manmade global warming”

It seems that every few weeks we hear or see some scientific data that seriously challenges the politically correct notion that the activities of man, burning fossil fuels for energy, are irreversibly and catastrophically damaging the Earth’s atmosphere and causing global temperatures to rise to dangerous levels.

There are two competing ideas about the last two decades of global temperatures: One says temperatures have plateaued for the last 18 years, but the other that says the rising temperature trend has continued through that period.

According to a CNS News story Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville, argues that there has been no global warming for at least the last 18 years, and bases that position on actual raw temperature data he and fellow University of Alabama/Huntsville professor and NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer collected from 14 instruments aboard various weather satellites.

However, in a story in The Washington Post, a group of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say that based upon their analysis of new surface temperature data and corrections to old data that NOAA knew were imperfect, there has been no break in global warming.

Some questions arise from these diametrically opposed opinions.
    •    Which of the two methods of measuring global temperature – surface temperatures, used by the NOAA team, or satellite observations, used by Drs. Christy and Spencer – is the most accurate? Or is some combination of the two, or some other method, more accurate?
    •    If trained scientists do not, cannot or will not agree on what the truth is about whether temperatures are rising or not, how can the rest of us understand climate changes?
    •    Since the outcome of its analysis confirmed NOAA’s previously held idea about global temperatures increasing, and in light of previous manipulation of data by some well-known scientists, should we be concerned about NOAA “correcting” data it “knew were imperfect?”

Just last month The Daily Caller reported on a paper stating that the global temperature change observed over the last hundred years or so is well within the natural variability of the last 8,000 years.

What this means is that even if the global temperature has risen as the global warming faction says, it shouldn’t be a cause for concern, since global temperatures have been in the current range before, and long before man started doing the things the global warming gang thinks are responsible for the increase.

The paper was written by Dr. Philip Lloyd, a South Africa-based physicist and climate researcher, who examined ice core-based temperature data going back 8 millennia. Dr. Lloyd is a former lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), the body that is perhaps the most honored authority for climate opinion, and an organization that supports manmade global warming.

The work of Dr. Lloyd, Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer is out of the mainstream of climate opinion, a mainstream that is shrinking, as more of its members question the “settled science” of rising global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels, and recognize the failure of dozens of flawed climate models that predict warming that many scientists argue hasn’t occurred. More and more, this line of thinking appears more political than scientific.

One danger of politically influenced science is that some ideologically motivated government agency will use it as an excuse to impose draconian measures to achieve political goals, some of which are unachievable, and others that are dangerous to our economic system and well-being. Enter the Environmental Protection Agency, arguably the most harmful of the abundant federal bureaucracies that increasingly control our every word, thought and deed.

In its headlong effort to crush the economies of coal mining states and destroy businesses that rely in whole or in part on coal, the EPA has overdriven its headlights with a scheme that depends upon faking science.

The EPA attempted to impose a rule that mandates the use of so-called carbon capture and storage, where CO2 from burning coal would be injected underground instead of being released into the air. The agency was quite content to put this rule into effect, despite knowing that the method does not work.

“We submitted comments for the record explaining that EPA had made a mockery of the interagency review process, ignoring the government's own experts in order to push an ideological agenda,” the Energy and Environment Legal Institute’s Chris Horner said. Mr. Horner’s organization has forced the EPA to back down on imposing the rule, but a report by Inside EPA says that the White House may force the EPA to go to court and defend a process that it had to admit doesn’t work and is thereby legally indefensible.

Here is a multiple-choice question: Why would a federal agency attempt to impose a process on coal burning facilities that it knows doesn’t work?
   A. It believes it has unlimited power
   B. It cares little about the repercussions of its actions
   C. Its employees serve ideological and political masters instead of the American people
   D. All of the above

The EPA is upside-down.

Striking a Balance Between Energy Reality and Ideological Fantasy

This time last year the Energy Information Administration (EIA) had just released a report showing the energy sources for electricity production in 2012.

That report showed that more than one-third of the electricity in the US comes from burning coal, and coal and natural gas together produce 67 percent of our electricity. And nuclear power comprises about 19 percent. That is the reality of energy production in the United States.

President Barack Obama prefers producing electricity with clean, renewable sources like solar and wind. Currently, wind accounts for just 0.11 percent of energy production and solar accounts for 3.46 percent, according to the EIA report.

The ideological fantasy is the idea that in a few years we can transition to producing a majority of our energy from sources that today account for less than 5 percent of energy production. Even ramping up wind and solar to produce the 37 percent of energy produced by coal in only a few years is a fantasy.

Under the most desirable circumstances imaginable, this transition would still be a tall order, and current circumstances are a long, long way from ideal. Solar energy is almost twice as expensive as natural gas, and wind energy is 46 percent more expensive than natural gas.

If the portion of electricity produced by natural gas were replaced with solar power, the price of electricity would increase by about 25 percent, and the costs for replacing coal-fired electricity with wind and solar are higher still.

Despite the difficulty with making this transition at all, or transitioning in a rational manner to keep pain and inconvenience to a minimum, the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the coal industry, and force the country to transition to producing electricity from clean sources that are not yet capable of doing the job.

Mr. Obama once said that anyone who wanted to build a coal-fired generating plant could do so, but the venture would go bankrupt, and those in coal producing states have already experienced the pain from this War on Coal.

Dan Lowery, writing for SNL Financial last September, paints the jobs picture: “Employment among U.S. coal miners plummeted by roughly 19 percent in the first quarter compared to the end of 2012, according to federal data.” He went on to say the number of employees of coal operators and contractors fell by more than 30,000 from 2011 to early 2013.

Coal jobs suffer from excessive government regulation, but also are affected by low natural gas prices. But then natural gas is also on the list of no-no energy sources.

An analysis for the Heritage Foundation predicts that significantly reducing coal’s share in America’s energy mix would, before 2030, destroy more than 500,000 jobs, cause a family of four to lose more than $1,000 in annual income, and increase electricity prices by 20 percent.

“Even worse,” authors Nicolas Loris, David Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Kevin Dayaratna write, “the Americans forced into unemployment lines and those paying higher energy prices couldn’t even claim that their suffering is helping to save the planet. If America stopped all carbon emissions, it would decrease the global temperature by only 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050.”

While loudly and frequently pointing out the problems with coal, oil and natural gas, the green faction remains mostly silent about the problems with wind and solar energy installations. The obvious weaknesses are that if the wind isn’t blowing and if the sun isn’t shining, turbines and solar panels produce no electricity. So when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, more dependable sources must be used for production. That means that coal, oil and/or natural gas units must run 24 hours a day in backup mode in order to be ready when needed.

The wind and solar energy that the environmentalists count on to reduce pollution produced by fossil fuels actually create serious pollution problems themselves. Both use rare earth minerals in their manufacture, and the mining and processing of these minerals generates hazardous and radioactive byproducts.

Both wind and solar have a negative impact on wildlife. The mirror-like surface of solar panels attracts birds, which think they are bodies of water, like ponds and lakes. The birds then flock to the solar array, where they are fried from the heat of the reflected sunlight.

Wind turbines also claim their share of birds, in addition to warming the land beneath them. "Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," according to Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany. So, while they don’t put CO2 into the air, “clean” energy sources cause their own form of climate change.

Combining the substantially higher cost of wind and solar energy with the job losses from the War on Coal, and the fact that trading fossil fuels for “clean,” renewable energy will produce miniscule benefits to the environment, one has to seriously consider the wisdom of this obsession.

Potpourri: government porn, federal lands, freedom of speech, etc.

Here’s an example of what can happen when there are too many government employees with too much time on their hands.

A report says that an Environmental Protection Agency employee watches porn for up to 6 hours a day. He makes $120,000 a year, and still has his job.

Nothing epitomizes a government that is so big and inefficient that its left hand has no idea not just what the right hand is doing, but doesn’t even know what its own fingers are doing. Or, just doesn’t care.

When the number of employees in a department or agency exceeds the number of truly essential employees, bad things happen, as the EPA example shows.

Agencies like the EPA are regulators; they produce regulations. Too many regulations exist already, and those people are paid to create more. On second thought, maybe it’s less harmful if they watch porn.

An efficient government, the kind of government we expect, deserve and pay for, should have few enough employees that every one of them is busy 8 hours a day doing beneficial work, serving us to the best of their ability, and to our highest expectations.

One of the major reasons our government has grown so humongous and overbearing is because too many people don’t understand that government is limited in its scope by the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution, and haven’t been paying attention to what is happening, or haven’t protested it. Still others seem to like living under the federal boot or seek control over us.

Did you know that the federal government owns or controls nearly one-third of the land in the US? Do you imagine that the feds are making the most beneficial use of it?

Some of it is used for government installations, national parks and memorials and so forth, which is fine. But much of it either lies essentially unused, like the land where Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his fellow ranchers freely grazed their cattle for decades before the federal government took over the land on the fraudulent premise that a tortoise that lived there was a “threatened” species.

More than a few cited Mr. Bundy as being a law breaker, so they thought it was just fine when the Bureau of Land Management sent 200 armed Rangers to the area because Mr. Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees for many years.

Mr. Bundy’s critics apparently believe that “if government says so, we must do it.” Had our forebears had this attitude, hundreds of singers at sporting events would be badly singing “God Save The Queen” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Other federal lands imprison vast stores of natural resources that would unleash new jobs and prompt energy independence.

When it was announced that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been invited to speak at the Rutgers University graduation and receive an honorary degree, some members of the faculty passed resolutions calling for her to be “disinvited.”  Students protested outside the office of the university president, some with signs calling her a “war criminal” because of her role in the Iraq War and the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding.

Showing she clearly has more class than those faculty members and students, Dr. Rice, withdrew her acceptance. “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families,” she said. “Rutgers’ invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.”

And so the tolerant and open-minded atmosphere of the university endures and the grand ideal of free and open debate of important, often conflicting ideas on campuses everywhere may continue for yet a while longer.

Then there is this: “I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” warned Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman in an interview. “The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the Internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and Internet communications,” he added.

You have to admire the determination of the leftists to find a way to defeat contrary opinions when they cannot do so through the power of superior ideas and arguments. When they have control of government resources, they have no compunction about unleashing this power against their political enemies. “Well, we may not be right, but we will prevail.”

I’ve had an epiphany about Benghazi. I have adopted the Dem/lib philosophy: “Dude, that’s so yesterday.”

Since it happened on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s watch, and she is satisfied that all the questions have been answered, shouldn’t that be enough for anybody? What difference, at this point, does it make? Now I can focus on other liberal goals, like which of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights we should trash next.

Oh, have you heard that a new helicopter fleet to ferry the president for short distances is being considered, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will only cost $20 billion?

Going Rogue, Part X: Americans just don’t properly appreciate the EPA

Americans do not fully appreciate the efforts of government to protect them from a wide variety of threats to their health and safety. This effort occurs to some degree at the more local levels, but the real champion of this grand effort is the federal government.

While many federal agencies contribute to this effort, one goes far beyond the others at trying to keep us safe: the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.

The EPA is so concerned for the safety and protection of the citizens of the U.S. that it has issued thousands of regulations requiring specific steps be taken to reduce or eliminate actual or potential harm. This agency is so concerned for our welfare that it has even required, under penalty of heavy fines, the use of things that are unavailable.

As part of the Renewable Fuel Standard the EPA required gasoline producers to use cellulosic biofuels, and in its paternalistic effort to keep us safe from threats real and imagined, the EPA fines producers for not using the required quantities of biofuel ingredients, even though those quantities are unavailable.

Not everyone is on board with the EPA’s magnificent efforts on our behalf, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, whose office is suing the EPA over greenhouse gas standards for new power plants. These standards are, according to the AG and the Senator, “impossible” to meet.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and energy industry groups have jumped on the anti-EPA band wagon by urging the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last August to strike down a federal rule limiting mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants, saying the Agency used flawed methods to create unachievable emissions standards.

Even the EPA’s fellow federal agency, the State Department, has shocked Americans by daring to disagree with the ideological environmental dogma of the Obama administration.

When the State Department was performing an environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline project, the EPA intervened. The pipeline project would carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries in the U.S., which supporters say would provide a big step toward energy independence. The EPA argued, however, that this pipeline should be treated differently than every other pipeline ever constructed in the country.

The State Department’s report found that the project would create nearly 2,000 jobs lasting for two years and would support more than 40,000 jobs, and further finds that the pipeline provides enough positives to negate whatever negatives the EPA believes may result.

Even the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers found reason to criticize the EPA’s zealous efforts to protect us from every conceivable negative influence in our lives. The Boilermakers’ President Emeritus Charles W. Jones states in a commentary on the union’s Web site, “particle and ozone standards will damage the economy without significantly helping the environment.”

The EPA has moved to make ozone and airborne particle standards so strict, in fact, “that former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus has called them ‘an impossible standard of perfection,’" the commentary continues. “So strict that many U.S. electrical power plants, pulp mills, cement kilns, chemical plants, smelters, and manufacturing plants are expected to close down rather than try to meet them. Thousands of American workers could lose their jobs. So strict that many of the scientists on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) cannot support them,” Mr. Jones states, citing the effects on his organization’s members.

Thirty-nine Congressional Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R -KY) are attempting to use a rare legislative tactic to block planned Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas standards that would limit the amount of carbon new power plants can emit. The rarely used Congressional Review Act enables the filing of a formal resolution of disapproval that allows Congress to block executive branch regulations that it considers onerous.

Last month, a federal court dealt a serious blow to the EPA's renewable fuels push by ruling that the agency exceeded its authority by mandating refiners use cellulosic biofuels because of their commercial scarcity, a determination that should not require legal action.

It is encouraging to see opposition to the tyranny of the EPA growing, and at last see meaningful opposition coming from Congress. However, the majority of this opposition comes from Republicans, while the timid Democrats mostly sit on their hands, allowing the executive branch to run roughshod over the legislative branch, while their constituents get crushed under the federal boot.

The Democrats simply look the other way, likely because the lead perpetrator of this unconstitutional behavior is one of their own. They ought to think a little (for a change) and realize that someday it may be a Republican in the position to abuse the office, and the Congress.

It is doubtful that any of this will have much of a positive effect on this out-of-control agency, which, because of its ideological blinders and the infection of uncontrolled zealotry that is the hallmark of the Obama administration, ignores the damage its policies and regulations do to the country it is supposed to serve.