In a column she posted at the Huffington Post, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson continued in her attempts to rebrand the Agency into something it never has been nor was intended to be: a creator of wealth. Jackson surely recognizes that the tired, old “sky is falling” message that has traditionally driven environmental agendas has less traction than ever given the economic realities of 2010. So, while she isn’t ready to abandon the fear-mongering tactics that are ingrained in the green movement, Jackson is working hard to create a parallel reality, one in which there is an absolutely phenomenal return on investment whenever the government imposes a new round of environmental regulations.

In a draw-dropping example of the old saw that “correlation does not equate to causation” the administrator told America that the Clean Air Act has created a venerable cornucopia of riches:

“…as air pollution has dropped over the last 40 years, our national GDP has risen by 207 percent. The total benefits of the Clean Air Act amount to more than 40 times the costs of regulation. For every one dollar we have spent, we have received more than $40 of benefits in return, making the Clean Air Act one of the most cost-effective things the American people have done for themselves in the last half century.”

How does one calculate a whopping 4,000% return on Clean Air Act investments? If you’re the EPA, you point to increased productivity that you happily attribute to less lost time due to illness in the workplace, as well as avoided medical costs. Not that you actually have to prove that any of those results actually occur. All you need is a few pointy-headed academics with calculators who can punch the right numbers, attach a certain value to sick days and medical condition and – voila – you too can create trillions in phantom economic benefits.

That’s the method that has been used to justify just about every major piece of Clean Air regulation and Jackson’s EPA has shifted this technique into hyper-drive. If the numbers that she uses to justify the sweeping, radical environmental initiatives her Agency is pushing are to be believed, nobody will ever miss work again and the health care industry will have to close its doors for a lack of business. And yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. (more…)

Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but some opinions are just plain embarrassing. In a June 8 Op-Ed published in the New York Times, Stanford University professor Jon A. Krosnick postulated that the vast majority of Americans believe that global warming is both real and man-made, and – ergo – Senators would be well-advised to vote against the Murkowski Resolution when it comes to a vote today.

It’s pretty obvious that Krosnick, a professor of communication, political science and psychology, doesn’t actually understand the subject matter or what the Murkowski resolution is about. He starts his Op-Ed by declaring:

On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.

And he closes with this piece of advice:

When senators vote on emissions limits on Thursday, there is one other number they might want to keep in mind: 72 percent of Americans think that most business leaders do not want the federal government to take steps to stop global warming. A vote to eliminate greenhouse gas regulation is likely to be perceived by the nation as a vote for industry, and against the will of the people.

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When it comes to environmental topics, the biggest failing of the lazy, old media is not what they tell you, but what they leave unsaid. Yesterday’s release of the American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2010 report provides textbook examples of how mainstream journalists can’t, or won’t, take the time to do their jobs. Most MSM stories covering the ALA report read like slightly modified versions of an ALA press release, which, one suspects, was probably the case. Consider this talking point that the ALA kindly provided:

The report finds that unhealthy air posed a threat to the lives and health of more than 175 million people—roughly 58 percent of the population.

Forbes’ Tim Kiladze dutifully regurgitated this misleading talking point back to readers:

The ALA found that over 175 million Americans, or 58% of the population, live in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution.

That sounds pretty authoritative, doesn’t it? Downright scary too. Fifty-eight per cent of the population is at risk? But, having been trained in the sciences rather than journalism, when I read something like that, I can’t help but wonder: why aren’t people dropping in the streets if things are so bad? Or, put another way, what does a subjective term like “unhealthy air” actually mean? (more…)

Nobody has to read the 2,310 pages of the health care bill to know why it will ruin health care in America. You don’t have to go any further than page 49, which marks the end of Subtitle E, “Governance,” to understand what’s coming. Subtitle E creates the office of the “Health Choices Commissioner,” the person charged with putting into effect all of the wonderful regulatory mechanisms that H.R. 4872 demands. But, in the regulatory sense, the Commissioner is not a person. The Commissioner is rather an institution, one that will have powers and responsibilities unprecedented in American history.

Even if Obamacare immediately did all of the things that the president claims it will (which I don’t for a minute believe); even if lowered the deficit, reduced the cost of health care, improved the quality of that care and increased access to it, does anyone who has ever dealt with any of today’s bloated, creeping, undead regulatory agencies of government actually believe that such a happy situation would last? If there is one thing that those of us who deal with government bureaucracy know, it is this: government bureaucracy never gets better, never increases in efficiency and never costs less. Never.

In my business, the environmental industry, the EPA has a position analogous to Health Choices Commissioner: EPA Administrator. Practically everything that the EPA does, on the federal and state levels, flows down from the power granted to the EPA Administrator. A president can appoint a marvelous Administrator, or a terrible one (Obama’s choice, Lisa Jackson, falls into the latter category) but it really doesn’t matter. The choice of the figurehead sitting on top of the pyramid is merely the difference between the thousands of thousands of bureaucrats on the bottom – the people who actually interact with the regulated community – creating a pile of obstacles the size of Mt. Everest to obstruct industry, or a pile the size of Mt. McKinley. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because you can’t get over, around, under or through the obstructions. (more…)

If you live in a coal state, make no mistake about it: Barack Obama and the Administrator of his USEPA, Lisa Jackson, are looking to take you down, by any means – direct or indirect – at their disposal. Among the schemes in the pipeline is this: a proposal that would make burning coal to produce power a much more expensive proposition, by attaching billions of dollars more costs before the residue of the coal-burning process could be reused or disposed of. Ironically, Obama and Jackson are on the threshold of making an ill-considered decision that would undermine one of the most successful recycling programs in the history of the nation.

USEPA is deciding whether or not to declare the ash that remains after burning coal a hazardous waste. The agency began considering reclassification following a disastrous release of 1.7 million cubic yards of fly ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant, a large coal-fired power station located east of Knoxville, Tennessee, in December 2008. That release, caused by the failure of an earthen retention wall, caused many environmental groups to renew their call for the USEPA to classify coal ash as a hazardous waste.

The Sierra Club, and other environmental groups, maintain that this action is necessary because coal ash contains, among other things:”…arsenic, selenium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, boron, thallium, and aluminum – toxic heavy metals that have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and neurological disorders, and which clearly threaten nearby communities and ecosystems.” (more…)

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). (more…)

You’ve read the stories. You’ve seen the quotes and the scary pictures and graphics. Unless the Senate passes a cap and trade bill to regulate (aka: tax) greenhouse gas emissions, the USEPA will regulate those emissions through the Clean Air Act and – cue ominous music – you’re not going to like that.

Don’t buy it. It’s a bluff. The last thing that the Obama administration and USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson want to do is to try to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. It would be a nightmare for the USEPA, creating enmity among large swathes of the populace, forcing people to reassess the shaky science behind global warming and it would take many, many years to implement the regulatory measures necessary to actually reduce these emissions. The Clean Air Act threat is a desperate attempt at extortion, with the ultimate goal of forcing a pointless cap and trade bill down our throats.

Trust me here. I’m an expert on two things: 1) the best places to enjoy a cold beer in the southeast side of Chicago, and 2) air pollution regulation, especially the Clean Air Act. Indeed, I wrote the book. (Which I encourage nobody to buy, because, unless you happen to manage environmental affairs for some industrial concern, it will bore you to tears). Even given Barack Obama’s vaunted talent for ignoring and working around rules that he finds inconvenient, the Clean Air Act presents too many insurmountable obstacles for even an “Ocean Reversing Czar” to overcome. The reasons why are complicated, but we’ll do this in a couple of parts and – hopefully – I’ll keep the explanations entertaining enough that you won’t fall asleep.

Let’s start here: exposing the tyranny of the system: (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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