22 thoughts on “The EPA”

  2. Pure and simple bullshit. There is certainly an argument that environmental protection is going too far nowadays – but without some sort of regulation, the UK goes back to the days to the Great Stink and rivers scoured clean of multicellular life, and the USA goes back to Love Canal.

  3. Firstly, I completly disagree that a clean enviroment should be considered a “luxury” good since the enviroment was clean to begin with and noone had to pay to make it that way. But even accepting that notion for a moment… what gives a company the right to take away my luxury goods? A corporation/individual has no right to come into my home and take my luxury goods. Why should a corporation have the right to pollute my enviroment? They shouldn’t. That is why we need to be able to prevent/punish them from/for doing so.

    1. So the environment is your luxury good? You have dominion over the entire environment, and no one can “take away” your clean world? Seems to me you’re imposing your right to the entire world on the rest of us…

      1. You’re misunderstanding me. I’m not talking about the whole world in this case (although I do think we need to be concerned with the global problem). I’m talking about my local air, and my local water. I like Ron Paul’s take on this issue. We don’t really need an EPA, we just need strictly enforced property rights. The flip side of that though is that the public litigation costs can in some cases cost more then a regulatory body, so we need a balanced approach. I’m willing to accept that the EPA goes too far in places, and understand that there are deminishing returns on how hard they push, but I don’t think that just completly erasing all regulations and hoping for the best makes any sense at all.

  4. Would that be the Love Canal that the company was forced by the government to sell the land to the government, and which land the government broke the containment after being warned not to?

    1. Don’t forget “Oxygenated gasoline”, where the government mandated additives to the gas and then, when the additives turned up in watersheds, the government sued the refiners for not disobeying the mandate.

      1. Oohh, MTBE, no longer the wonder chemical. I’d forgotten about that. Remember when E-10 was going to provide cleaner air or something?

  5. “A clean environment is a luxury good. ”

    an ultra clean environment is a luxury good and that’s what epa is pushing these days. i say roll all epa regs back to 1996.

    1. The very nature of any bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. Rolling back the regulations would mean the agency isn’t as necessary as before. It simply isn’t going to happen unless Congress forces them to, which at the moment seem highly unlikely.

      As measuring technology increases, so does the ability to regulate. Where the best technology used to only be able to detect substances in the parts per million range, limits were set based on that. Today, we’re talking about parts per trillion and it won’t be long before we’re measuring parts per quadrillion. As sensitivity increases, so does the call to regulate tighter limits even if they have no basis to claim harm.

  6. It’s not even about cleaning the environment. It’s about pauperizing ourselves and freezing in the dark to reduce CO2 emissions while China continues to build coal plants.

  7. Today’s NRO had a piece by Senator John Barrasso that’s well worth reading. Last night in the Senate his amendment to stop the EPA Cement MACT regulation was disallowed by the Democrat majority leader.

    The Cement MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) regulation will force all Portland cement plants to spend a fortune on scubbing technology for their rotary cement kilns, and the technology must be in place by 2013. Senator Barrasso says it will cause a 20% drop in cement output, much higher prices, and the loss of 80,000 construction jobs.

    So while Obama is touting the construction of roads and bridges, all this infrastructure spending to restore the economy and put construction workers back on the job, his EPA is effectively halting construction projects because nobody will be able to get any cement, and without cement there’s no concrete, no new roads, now new bridges, no new office parks, no new manufacturing plants, no new stadiums, and no new houses.

  8. “Last night in the Senate his amendment to stop the EPA Cement MACT regulation was disallowed by the Democrat majority leader.”

    that’s why the epa should be drastically downsized and reconfigure to being an agency that only can recommend to congress regs.

  9. “A clean environment is a luxury good.”

    No Rand, I am sorry but that is utter nonsense.

    Chasing Parts Per Billion of copper and zinc out of effluent is a luxury good.

    The first 15 years of the clean water and clean air acts were quite good. It is a good thing that fish can live in major rivers and that the Cuyahoga river no longer catches fire. The problem is we are chasing dubious diminishing returns and the costs being imposed to achieve going from 98% to 99.5% is greater thant the costs for the 1st 98%

    The EPA won its war but it refuses to leave the battlefield and disperse.

    I will argue that rabid Environmentalism is a luxury good espceially since it and the actual environment oftimes bear scant resemblence to each other.

  10. Wait till the EPA decides we have to clean radioactive potassium-40 out of the environment. We’ll have to vaporize the entire planet, including all life on it, and feed the resulting gas through an isotope seperator. It will cost an infinite amount and cause the extinction of all living things, but we’ll be safer!

  11. The only needed regulation is a prohibition on polluting. Tables of ‘acceptable limits’ might be a useful thing for NIST to tabulate. The standards are already below average natural ground concentrations in places, but ignore that for now.

    We don’t need the army of bureaucrats to enforce it – that’s what liability law is all about. Let the Sierra Club pay the fucking bill for suing over habitat or effluent levels.

    What we’ve got now is people deliberately screwing up the adversarial process – because the EPA is really “on the side of” whatever the environmentalists want this week.

    Sierra Club v dams -> protestors -> complaint to EPA -> EPA writes shitty case “defending” dam with quotes like “There is absolutely no benefit to this dam.” (Ignoring the 2 GW or whatever completely in the case.)

    -> Dam destroyed. Sierra Club reimbursed for their time, public stiffed for the dam employees pensions, the remaining cost of constructing the dam, the increased electric fee, the cost of -destroying- the dam, and – naturally – an abundant supply of hatcheries.

  12. George, they had a ruling on “Maximum ground concentration of lead” back in the eighties. It was so low that virgin swamp (where heavier metals naturally accumulate) was 10x the limit.

  13. We’re not only outsourcing our manufacturing jobs to the Third World, we’re outsourcing our pollution there as well. But, hey, it lets the enviros feel good about themselves. They get to enjoy all the benefits of modern society without having to see all that icky pollution. Win-win!

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