Messing With Texas
Regulation: The federal agency declares Texas unfit to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions and seizes control of the permitting process. Jobs, states' rights and the 2012 presidential election are all involved.
While most of America was unwrapping their Christmas presents, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was staring at a lump of coal the Environmental Protection Agency put in his state's stocking.
Actually, it wasn't a lump of coal — that causes global warming. And Santa won't be coming down any Texas chimney unless he checks with the EPA first.
Two days before Christmas, EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz, in a letter to industry, said the agency was taking permitting authority over refineries, power plants and cement facilities in Texas away from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) as of Jan. 2, 2011.
Happy New Year!
The EPA's new rules — continuing an Obama administration pattern of using regulations to circumvent the will of the people in implementing what it cannot get through Congress, such as cap-and-trade — were issued after the U.S. Supreme Court said it had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, the basis of all life on the planet and what we exhale, as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
Texas was not amused and is the only state to refuse to implement the rules, filing suit against the EPA.
In Texas' suit, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the documented IPCC and CRU fraud, on which EPA findings are based, made any policy decisions based on that work flawed and unjustified.
Abbott cited several examples in which he said climate scientists engaged in an "ongoing, orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research and manipulate temperature data."
"With billions of dollars at stake, EPA outsourced the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization (the IPCC) that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy," Abbott argued.
Perry , a champion of the 10th Amendment, says, "This legal action is being taken to protect the Texas economy and the jobs that go with it, as well as defend Texas' freedom to continue our successful environmental strategies free from federal overreach."
Two days after the midterm elections, President Obama served notice that the failure of the outgoing Congress to pass cap-and-trade and the unlikelihood of a GOP House pursuing the matter would not be an impediment.
"Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way," he said. "I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem."
Perry, a possible 2012 presidential contender, is a cat that refuses to be skinned without a fight. Perry calls the rules an overreach by the federal behemoth that will cripple his state's growing economy.
"The EPA's misguided plan paints a huge target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers by implementing unnecessary, burdensome mandates on our state's energy sector, threatening hundreds of thousands of Texas jobs and imposing increased living costs on Texas families," Katherine Cesinger, a Perry spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.
TCEQ is the world's second-largest environmental regulatory agency, after the EPA. Cesinger notes that the state's flexible air-quality permitting system, one that considers economic impact, has led to a 22% reduction in ozone and a 53% decrease in nitrous oxide since 2000.
This is not about the environment, but about power. It's about whether we will remain a constitutional republic in which the states retain the powers not given to the feds by the Constitution, or whether the feds can arbitrarily control our lives and usurp our freedoms based on flawed science and political ideology.
"Remember the EPA!" may soon rival "Remember the Alamo!" as a battle cry for freedom. The year 2012 may turn out to be a very interesting and pivotal one.