Dear 111^th Congress,

I know that you are very busy these days pondering new ways to screw up health care and figuring out exactly how much money you need to spend in order to reduce the deficit, but you might want to take a moment to examine what’s going on at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

You remember USEPA, right? Your predecessors created it and gave it the authority to ensure that America has clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. The Agency has been pretty darn successful at fulfilling that mission and it employs armies of scientists, attorneys, technicians and other professionals to accomplish the tasks assigned to it. Paying all of those troops is expensive, as in several billion dollars worth of expensive, but seeing as how new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has inflated the Agency’s budget by almost 50%, there would seem to be little reason for USEPA to outsource its authority. Yet, that’s exactly what has been going on, and I thought that someone should bring the situation to your attention.

Now as we all know, George W. Bush was the worst environmental President in history. Unfortunately, this assertion is complicated by the embarrassing fact that the amount of pollutants in the nation’s air was reduced to the lowest levels that we have ever seen since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970. It therefore behooves USEPA and the current administration to redefine the term “clean air” by redefining the standards that determine what is clean and what is dirty. Administrator Jackson has tackled this problem, publishing a new standard for nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and proposing new standards for ozone and sulfur dioxide (SO₂).

But, when I say that Jackson is tackling the problem, I’m really not using the appropriate gridiron metaphor. Jackson has handed the problem off to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) a collection of seven academics who look at the world through green-tinted glasses and whose advice, quite frankly, furthers an agenda that only Greenpeace could love. If it’s your intention to turn environmental policy over to a collection of left-wing environmentalists hiding underneath mortarboards, I will of course defer to your sage judgment. But, if that’s not what you had in mind, you might want to take a closer look at what’s going on over at USEPA.

As Jackson has feverishly proposed new standard after new standard, she consistently cites this reason to justify her measures:  “EPA’s proposal is consistent with the recommendations of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.” There a number of reasons why this makes for bad public policy and I know that you don’t have time to delve into the messy details, much less understand them, as your inability to examine the shaky foundations of “climate change” has demonstrated. I’ll append some of those details in a post script, in case you have a staffer or two hanging around with nothing to do. Suffice it to say that the incredibly low clean air standards that Jackson has proposed and promulgated will have a marked effect on America’s economic health. For example:

• The new NO₂ standard will make new cars more expensive, require expensive modifications to older cars and give local EPAs more control over the way that people operate their motor vehicles.

• The proposed new SO₂ standard will effectively kill any new coal-fired power plants in this country and will make existing coal-fired power plants more expensive to operate. In terms of hurting the coal industry and making the use of America’s cheapest energy resource unpalatable, this proposal will have a more detrimental effect than any cap and trade bill might have.

• The proposed new ozone standard will also make coal-fired power more expensive, as well as making gasoline more expensive and increasing the cost of all sorts of consumer products.

USEPA acknowledges that these costs will be borne as a result of the Agency’s actions, but claims that those costs will be more than offset by the benefits. What benefits you ask? They primarily point to two purported cost savings. Increased economic productivity because workers won’t call in sick quite as much as they do now, and increased longevity among the populace. Perhaps this logic makes sense to you, but it rings a bit hollow to me. As a fellow who has worked in the private sector for over twenty-five years, it has been my observation that people who like to use their full compliment of sick days will do so whether they are actually ill or not. Further, the Agency’s longevity argument confuses me. As part of the health care debate, it was said that aging Americans are more expensive to care for. Jackson tells us that longer life expectancy equates to dollars in our pockets. May I humbly suggest that we pick a lane?

Anyway, dear Congress, thank you for taking the time to consider this letter. I’m not sure what you would like USEPA to accomplish in these difficult times, but it seems to me that you might want to be sure that the country will be able to pay for it.

Sincerely,

Rich Trzupek

Post Script – A Few Boring Technical Details

1)      At first blush, the casual observer might assume that the new NO₂ standard is not more stringent because the new standard of 100 parts per billion (ppb) is almost double the old standard of 53 ppb. But – and here’s the subtle brilliance of the move – the new standard is based on one hour measurements, whereas the old one is an annual average. That makes the new standard much, much harder to meet because you don’t “average out” temporary anomalies. Those anomalies will become violations and provide a ready excuse to impose more regulations.

2)      The same goes for the proposed new SO₂ standard, which is also a one hour standard replacing the old 24 hour and annual standards.

3)      In order to meet the new NO₂ standard, USEPA suggests that we’ll need more regulations on motor vehicles, including: laws that prohibit long-term idling (sorry mom, you’ll just have to freeze while you’re waiting to pick up junior from school), better (read more expensive) catalytic converters and making owners of older cars buy new (again, more expensive) catalytic converters.

4)      Because the proposed SO₂ standard will create a lot more “dirty air” where there was none before, fossil fuel in general and coal-fired power plants in particular will take a hell of beating. As EPA says in background documents, fossil-fuel combustion generates about 2/3 of the nation’s SO₂ emissions. This standard gives the Agency an excuse to impose additional regulations on burning fossil fuels, making it more expensive to do so and, by extension, making the renewable energy sources it favors more competitive. It’s a nuanced strategy that will hurt the coal industry at least as much, if not more, than a cap and trade bill would.

5)      The proposed new ozone standard will affect the type (and therefore price) of gasoline sold, create more vehicle inspection programs across the nation and will also provide another excuse for USEPA to further regulate fossil fuel combustion of all sorts, since all of the above can be tied to ozone formation.

In a perverse kind of way, I sort of admire the Machiavellian brilliance of Lisa Jackson’s EPA. By using standards, rather than direct regulation, as the tool – and hiding behind CASAC to do it – the Agency creates a fait accompli. The regulations that will dictate how you drive your car and increase the cost of electricity will come, but not until Obama’s term is over. By then, everyone will forget how and why we “needed” these standards, only that they supposedly set the benchmark for air that’s safe to breathe.

Trust me folks, these new standards are going to leave a mark. But, outside of yours truly and a handful of my fellow techno-geeks on the industry side in this weird world of environmental regulation, few people realize that is so.