CEI Today: EPA abuse of power, gov't biometric database, and regulating commercial fishing
Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 09:23AM 
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Abusing Power, CEI, EPA, Regulatory Actions Press Releases
Entries in Regulatory Actions (487)
Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 09:23AM Abusing Power, CEI, EPA, Regulatory Actions CEI Today: Senate vote on EPA nominee, suing the EPA, and labor unions vs workers
Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 08:07AM 
EPA NOMINEE - BRIAN McNICOLL
Fox News: EPA tries hard to keep nominee Gina McCarthy 'clean' before confirmation hearings
The Environment and Public Works Committee will vote this week on Gina McCarthy's nomination. Senators should not act on her nomination until she orders the veil lifted and lets Americans know her record with regard to President Obama's war on coal and efforts by the administration to build outside support for a carbon tax. > Read more
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SUING EPA - MARLO LEWIS
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LABOR UNIONS - MATT PATTERSON Many people realize that unions can hurt the workers they claim to represent. For example, the United Auto Workers union drove labor costs up for the Big Three automakers, a major factor in driving General Motors into bankruptcy and leaving Detroit a shadow of its former glory.
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CEI ANNUAL DINNER & GALA
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CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org. Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.
CEI, EPA, Nominations, Regulatory Actions, Unions, Worker Rights NH GOP - NH EDITORIAL PAGES PAN SHEA-PORTER'S FAILED LEADERSHIP ON FINANCIAL ISSUE
Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 07:38AM 
Concord – Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter is under fire this week from New Hampshire editorial pages because of her failed leadership on critical financial issues affecting her constituents. The Union Leader, Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat, criticized Shea-Porter for failing to oppose crushing new EPA regulations and for her unwillingness to speak out against the Internet sales tax.
“Congresswoman Shea-Porter has refused to speak out against the crushing new regulations and tax hikes that Washington is trying to impose on New Hampshire. She has let down her constituents by refusing to provide any leadership on the critical financial issues facing the First District,” said NHGOP Executive Director Matthew Slater. “Congresswoman Shea-Porter’s approval ratings have dropped dramatically because voters realize that she would rather bow to Washington’s special interests than stand up for the Granite State’s fiscally responsible values.”
A poll released by the University of New Hampshire in April found that 31% of First District residents have a favorable opinion of Congresswoman Shea-Porter, while 32% have an unfavorable opinion of her. In UNH’s August poll 49% rated Shea-Porter favorably while only 28% rated her unfavorably.
What They’re Saying About Shea-Porter’s Failed Financial Leadership
Foster’s Daily Democrat: “Shaheen, Ayotte and U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster from the 2nd Congressional District have all vocally opposed the Internet tax. Instead, Shea-Porter had a spokesman simply parrot Shaheen’s position on the issue.” (5/8/13)
- Foster’s: “What has happened to the once demonstrative Shea-Porter who climbed to fame after protesting at a President George W. Bush speech?” (5/8/13)
- Foster’s: “Why has she suddenly gone Caspar Milquetoast when it comes to critical financial issues affecting the Seacoast and Granite State businesses?” (5/8/13)
Portsmouth Herald: “U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter hosted a community forum last Tuesday that was billed as a talk about the future of Great Bay. In reality, it was a reminder of the massive expenses communities around the bay face to meet new Environmental Protection Agency mandates to reduce nitrogen emissions from their wastewater treatment plants.” (5/6/13)
- Herald: “While lowering nitrogen emissions from the plants is an opportunity it will require a collective half-billion dollar investment from the communities being forced to rebuild their wastewater treatment plants. It’s financially somewhere between a hardship and a doomsday for many ratepayers.” (5/6/13)
- Herald: “This is wrong, and if Shea-Porter is going to host community forums, we expect more from her…her words truly missed the mark.” (5/6/13)
New Hampshire Union Leader: “Carol Shea-Porter has a funny way of working in Washington to protect New Hampshire. Instead of fighting bad or questionable ideas that threaten to bring lasting harm to the state, she supports the ideas and works to carve out small exceptions for New Hampshire.” (5/6/13)
- New Hampshire Union Leader: “Shea-Porter, of course, is siding with the EPA, questionable science and all. Instead of siding with the local municipalities, she said she would try to get federal money to help pay for the costs of meeting the EPA's standards. She called water bodies like the Great Bay "national treasures" that need to be protected. True, but how? That's the question, and Shea-Porter's answer is: However the EPA says.” (5/6/13)
- New Hampshire Union Leader: “Also last week, Shea-Porter finally took some kind of position on the Internet sales tax legislation pending in Washington, which could lead to the destruction of the New Hampshire Advantage. Her position was to support Jeanne Shaheen's proposed amendment carving out an exception for states that do not have a sales tax. Of course, once the law is in place, that exception can be revoked easily.” (5/6/13)
- New Hampshire Union Leader: "From Obamacare to Medicaid expansion to the Internet sales tax, it would be helpful if New Hampshire's 1st District were represented in Congress by someone who actually sided with New Hampshire instead of Washington power-grabbers."(5/6/13)
CEI Today: Life of Julius video, GOP v Margaret Thatcher, and Calif. chemical regulation
Monday, April 29, 2013 at 08:49AM 
Meet Julius: How Unions Hurt The Average Worker
Julius is an African American man living in modern-day America. Julius is a fictitious character, but the problems he faces are real problems that real people face every day. He wants the American Dream. He wants prosperity and opportunity. He wants his kids to have a better life than he did. When he retires, he wants to know that his years of hard work have meant some level of comfort in his old age.
In other words, Julius wants what all of us want. Unfortunately, his economic hopes are continually frustrated in ways both large and small, both obvious and subtle, by a powerful force: labor unions.
Please come see Julius’s story at WorkplaceChoice.org, and share with your friends and family. After all — you are Julius. And so are we all. > View the video
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GOP vs MARGARET THATCHER - MATTHEW MELCHIORRE & RYAN YOUNG
Margaret Thatcher got entrepreneurialism. Why won’t the GOP?
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BPA CHEMICAL RISK - ANGELA LOGOMASINI If you want to have fun in California’s Disneyland, avoid reading the warning signs saying that products used in the park may give you cancer and reproductive problems! They’re not just a buzz kill, they are plain dumb and misinformed. But it’s state law that they be there. California’s nonsensical Proposition 65 law directs regulators to place chemicals on a “toxic” substances list, and then forces companies to issue warning labels when they use these substances to make consumer products and food. But regulators list chemicals for myriad stupid reasons. |
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CEI ANNUAL DINNER & GALA
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CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information about CEI, please visit our website, cei.org, and blogs, Globalwarming.org and OpenMarket.org. Follow CEI on Twitter! Twitter.com/ceidotorg.
CEI, GOP, Labor Unions, Regulatory Actions Cooler Heads Digest 26 April 2013
Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 06:58AM 
In the News
The Climate Circus Leaves Town
Steven Hayward, Weekly Standard, 26 April 2013
Debunking the Gasland Sequel
Steve Everley, Energy in Depth, 25 April 2013
Fisker = Solyndra
Ronald Bailey, Hit & Run, 24 April 2013
Obama Administration Missed Clues on Fisker
Matthew Daly, AP, 24 April 2013
Reform the Wind PTC in 2013!
Lisa Linowes, Master Resource, 24 April 2013
Boxer’s Claims on Behalf of EPA Nominee Don’t Hold Water
Brian McNicoll, Daily Caller, 23 April 2013
Explaining Energy Gridlock
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 22 April 2013
Dysfunction Rampant at Energy Department
Paul Chesser, National Legal & Policy Center, 22 April 2013
Europe Is Becoming a Green Energy Basket Case
Washington Post editorial, 21 April 2013
News You Can Use
Is Tesla Next?
Fisker Automotive, a luxury electric car manufacturer that benefited from almost $200 million in stimulus benefits, is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, informed opinion on Wall Street predicts a similar fate for Tesla Motors, another luxury electric car manufacturer that benefited from almost $460 million in stimulus benefits. According to CNN, more than 40% of the company's available shares were being held by investors who are betting the stock will go down.
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
D.C. Circuit Backs EPA's War on Coal (Although There Is a Silver Lining)
The federal D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week overturned a lower court decision that the Environmental Protection Agency could not use its veto over Clean Water Act dredge and fill permits retroactively after the Army Corps of Engineers had issued the permit. This means that the EPA acted legally in yanking the permit of Arch Coal’s Spruce Number One surface coal mine in Logan County, West Virginia, several years after the investment was made and the mine started producing coal.
“The unambiguous language of subsection 404(c) manifests the Congress’s intent to confer on EPA a broad veto power extending beyond the permit issuance,” wrote Appeals Judge Karen Henderson. The two other judges on the panel, Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas Griffith, agreed with Henderson’s opinion.
If upheld on further appeal, this means that investing in surface mining projects will be a gamble. Hundreds of millions of dollars could be lost if the EPA decides that it doesn’t like the looks of someone and cancels the permit years after it has been issued. West Virginia's congressional delegation have introduced a bill, H. R. 524, to prohibit retroactive vetoes of section 404 permits.
William Yeatman, my CEI colleague, noted in a press release that the Appeals Court sent the case back to the federal district court to determine whether the EPA's scientific case for vetoing the permit was sound. According to William, "When all the hyperbole is stripped away, EPA’s only ‘evidence’ to justify its actions is a putative threat posed by saline effluent from the mine to an order of short-lived insects, which aren’t even an endangered species. This is plainly unreasonable: EPA shouldn’t be trading jobs for bugs absent a Congressional mandate to do so." See William's 2011 study that shows why the EPA's science is shoddy here.
EPA Critiques State Department on Keystone XL
The Environmental Protection Agency this week filed a lengthy comment on the State Department's draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on the long-delayed Keystone XL Pipeline. The EPA challenges the SEIS, which finds no major environmental problems, as being based on "insufficient information in regard to alternative routes, additional greenhouse gas emissions, and the impacts of spills.”
The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline would carry oil from Alberta's oil sands and North Dakota's Bakken field to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The pipeline requires a presidential permit because it crosses the international boundary with Canada. President Barack Obama has denied issuing the permit twice on specious grounds. The new application addresses the President's objections.
The EPA's official comments are largely repeated in stronger terms in many public comments filed by opponents of the pipeline. The EPA's comments do not constitute a formal objection. That could come later, which would mean that the SEIS had become an inter-agency dispute. Such disputes under the National Environmental Policy Act are resolved by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. At the end of the day, President Obama will make the decision. EPA's intervention gives him grounds to once again deny the Keystone permit.
Across the States
William Yeatman
Green Mandate Freeze Fails in North Carolina
By a 13-18 vote, the North Carolina House Public Utilities and Energy committee voted down SB 298, legislation that would have prevented the state’s green energy mandate increase from 3% to 12% of electricity sales. The bill had previously been passed out of the House Commerce and Job Development Subcommittee on Energy and Emerging Markets. Although North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate is small relative to similar production quotas in 28 other states, professional environmentalists and the green energy lobby reacted strongly in opposition to the bill, out of fear that it would engender a domino effect leading to the repeal of green energy mandates in other states.
L.A.’s Decision To Kick Coal Will Cost Ratepayers Big Time
During the 2000-2001 electricity crisis in California, Los Angelinos were spared the energy price spike that afflicted other Californians because the city-owned utility received almost 40% of its power from coal. This arrangement changed last month, when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city-run utility, succumbed to a long-term campaign waged by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to divest from coal. This week, the L.A. City Council added teeth to the utility’s announcement, by approving a plan to pay for a fuel switch from coal to gas at a 600 megawatt power plant in Utah with which the utility has a contract to purchase power. The City Council passed the measure unanimously (12 to 0) despite a warning from a ratepayer advocate, employed by the city, that the switch would carry a $500 capital cost, and an additional $150 million in added fuel costs.
Around the World
William Yeatman
Japan Turns To Coal, Because It’s Cheaper
Among the many harmful impacts of the Fukushima Daitchi disaster was the loss of almost 4,500 megawatts of nuclear-powered electricity generation. This is the equivalent of almost 9 average-sized power plants, and it represented a significant strain to the nation’s electricity grid. Initially, Japan relied on imported oil and gas to make up the difference in electricity generation, but this proved to be exorbitantly expensive. As a result, the country is turning to coal. Tokyo Electric, the largest state-regulated electric utility in Japan, recently added 26,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity generation. And earlier in the month, the utility negotiated unusually aggressively in securing a historically low price on coal imported from Australia. Finally, Japan's environmental regulators this month announced that they would accelerate permitting for new coal-fired power plants from 3 years (on average) to 1 year.
The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.GlobalWarming.org.