EPA’s Totalitarian Frontal Assault on America

Duggan Flanakin

Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is clearly on a mission. He has “bold aspirations, and a long to-do list,” says The Washington Post. But to succeed, the Post acknowledges, he must “help the EPA get its groove back.” As Reagan put it, “We’ve got a lot of work to do, starting with rebuilding staff morale and getting all our staff back to feeling as if they matter, their voices matter.” 

Regan says his job is “to restore the scientific integrity and the utilization of data, of facts, as we move forward, and make some very important decisions.” His second goal is to increase “cooperation” between the EPA and its “subordinate” state environmental agencies. EPA will dictate; states will fall in line. 

A big step toward that goal was extending a Memorandum of Agreement between the EPA, the Environmental Council of the States, and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. According to Regan, “EPA is committed to building on the values of transparency, respect, and an open dialogue that are the cornerstone of a successful partnership with the states.” As EPA defines the terms.

An Obama-appointed federal judge just restored the EPA’s use of “secret science” in formulating regulations that businesses and industries must follow just because the EPA says so – with “scientific evidence” that cannot be cross-examined. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris (in Great Falls, Montana) took just hours before vacating the Trump EPA rule that would have ended this Star Chamber style rule. 

For decades, the EPA relied on unreviewable studies to impose draconian restrictions on businesses and industries, and thus on the U.S. economy. Trump wanted to bring true transparency to the process. Opponents claimed the Trump secret science” rule would block the use of critical public health studies kept secret supposedly to protect the identities of trial participants – which of course was not the case. 

As Trump EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler explained, the “secret science” rule in no way blocked previous “secret” studies; rather, it created tiers in which preference is given to studies with public data. Peer reviewers looking at a study’s raw data did not need to know any of the subject’s names, so no patient confidentiality was at risk. Moreover, in most cases, a review of basic methods, statistics and results is sufficient to determine if they actually support the study’s conclusion. Wheeler also noted: 

“Too often Congress shirks its responsibility and defers important decisions to regulatory agencies. These regulators then invoke science to justify their actions, often without letting the public study the underlying data. Part of transparency is making sure the public knows what the agency bases its decisions on.”

Now the Biden-Harris EPA has revived its old policy based on a failed 2015 (Obama-Biden) rulemaking that twists the Clean Air Act language in an effort to destroy auto racing as a sport in the USA. 

The EPA claims modifying a vehicle previously certified for street driving for use as a competition-only racecar is unlawful even for vehicles that are trailered and never driven on public roads again. This policy seeks to end a 50-year-old American tradition. It has no precedent; even California exempts racing vehicles from regulation. 

Not only does the EPA claim it is illegal to convert a vehicle for racing by modifying its emission system; it claims manufacturing, selling or installing race parts for such vehicles is likewise unlawful. It’s even said enforcement actions against high performance parts – including superchargers, tuners and exhaust systems – will now be a top priority. 

This policy constitutes a direct assault on the nation’s 1,300 racetracks, tens of thousands of participants and vehicle owners, and millions of racing fans nationwide. It is also a death blow to retail sales of racing products, a $2 billion a year industry. The move appears to be part of the Obama-Biden-Harris EPA strategy to rid the planet (or at least the USA) of internal combustion engines by taking away the romance of the racecar. 

To try to thwart this EPA power grab, the Specialty Equipment Market Association has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in a lawsuit filed by Gear Box Z, Inc. challenging the racecar conversion ban. The industry group is also supporting the Recognizing the Protection of Motorsports Act (RPM Act), which reaffirms the legality of converting street vehicles into race-only vehicles and confirms the legitimacy of producing, marketing and installing racing equipment. 

They should prevail. But with today’s courts, do even the most specific laws still matter?

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial says the Biden-Harris EPA has a secret plan to force massive CO2 emissions reductions under the Clean Air Act, using ozone as its vehicle of choice. “Plan B” is the fallback strategy to be implemented once it is clear that even the Democrat-controlled Congress will not enact economy-killing anti-fossil fuel legislation. The ultimate goal is total fossil fuel eradication. 

Under Plan B, EPA will reset the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone to zero – way below natural levels that Mother Nature herself emits! The “science” is based on a questionable 2017 study from Harvard’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health, which claims there is no safe level of ozone in the atmosphere. How do you prosecute Mother Nature? 

Plan B responds to the failure of the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. It reflects former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s blunt admission that it is technically infeasible and even legally questionable to regulate CO2 as a “criteria pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. 

The simple reasons are fundamental. CO2 is what humans and animals exhale. It is what plants inhale to support photosynthesis and produce the oxygen that most life on Planet Earth requires to exist. It does not cause asthma or other diseases. CO2 emissions generated in a locality cannot be measured reliably and certainly cannot be reduced within the 10-year timetable for criteria pollutants. CO2 is not a pollutant. 

Using ozone and the NAAQS to regulate CO2 is reportedly the brainchild of Joe Goffman, whom the Biden-Harris Administration has installed as principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Goffman, a chief architect of the Obama era Clean Power Plan, is known as EPA’s “law whisperer.” His specialty is “teaching old laws to do new tricks.” 

Goffman’s plan was jump-started on January 19, 2021, when 16 Democratic state attorneys-general filed a legal challenge to the EPA’s recently reauthorized ozone NAAQS. Their one-paragraph sue-and-settle lawsuit claims the standards are “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious and therefore must be vacated.” 

The Trump EPA in December 2020 had retained the ozone NAAQS at levels set in 2015 by the Obama-Biden Administration. That action marked only the second time since the 1970 Clean Air Act was enacted that EPA completed its ozone NAAQS review within the mandatory 5-year timeframe. 

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Democratic AGs, green groups and top Biden environmental regulators intend to impose the Green New Deal on states through backdoor regulations, because they know they can’t get it through the front door of Congress, even this sycophantic Congress. 

Under this nefarious scheme – which could be imposed this year without any “open dialogue” in Congress – every state would be forever out of compliance, JunkScience.com director Steve Milloy emphasizes. It is simply impossible to eliminate natural background levels of ozone. But this action would give EPA effective and arbitrary control over the entire economy, especially fossil fuel use.

Giving unelected bureaucrats and a like-minded political cabal “effective and arbitrary control” over the entire U.S. economy creates a dictatorship of faceless and nameless totalitarians whose diktats the political class can claim they are powerless to upend. This is where America is headed, unless we stop these power-crazed autocrats.

EPA’s next regulatory tsunami

Trillions of dollars in ozone compliance and economic stagnation costs, for fabricated benefits

Paul Driessen          

Looming Environmental Protection Agency ozone regulations personify the Obama administration’s secrecy, collusion, fraud, and disdain for concerns about the effects that its tsunami of regulations is having on the livelihoods, living standards, health and welfare of millions of American families.

Virtually every EPA announcement of new regulations asserts that they will improve human health. Draconian carbon dioxide standards, for example, won’t just prevent climate change, even if rapidly developing countries continue emitting vast volumes of this plant-fertilizing gas. The rules will somehow reduce the spread of ticks and Lyme disease, and protect “our most vulnerable citizens.” It’s hogwash.

But Americans naturally worry about pollution harming children and the poor. That makes it easy for EPA to promulgate regulations based on false assumptions and linkages, black-box computer models, secretive collusion with activist groups, outright deception, and supposedly “scientific” reports whose shady data and methodologies the agency refuses to share with industries, citizens or even Congress.

It was only in May 2012 that EPA decided which US counties met new 2008 ozone standards that cut allowable ground-level ozone levels from 80 parts per billion to 75 ppb. Now EPA wants to slash allowable levels even further: to 70 or even 60 ppb, equivalent to 70 or 60 seconds in 32 years.

The lower limits are essential, it claims, to reduce smog, human respiratory problems and damage to vegetation. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says a 600-page agency staff report strongly recommends this reduction, and her Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agrees. They all say the lower limits are vital for protecting public health, especially “at-risk populations and life stages.” Her decision will ultimately involve “a scientific judgment” and will “keep people safe,” Ms. McCarthy assures us.

Under terms of a convenient federal court settlement, EPA must issue its proposed new standards by December 1 of this year, and make a final decision by October 2015. The process will be “open and transparent,” with “multiple opportunities” for public hearings and comment throughout, she promised.

EPA has offered little transparency, honesty or opportunity for fair hearings and input by impacted parties thus far, and we should expect none here. But other problems with this proposal are much more serious.

If the 60 ppb standard is adopted, 85% of all US counties would likely become “non-attainment” areas, making it difficult to establish new industrial facilities or expand existing plants. Even in Big Sky, clean-air Wyoming, Teton County could be out of compliance – mostly due to emissions from pine trees!

A Manufacturers’ Alliance/MAPI study calculated that a 60 ppb ozone standard would cost the US economy a whopping $1 trillion per year and kill 7.3 million jobs by 2020. A Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and National Association of Manufacturers study concluded that a 60 ppb rule would penalize the state $189 billion for compliance and $53 billion in lost gross domestic product between 2017 and 2040. That’s $10 billion per year in just one state.

But the standard would save lives, EPA predictably claimed, citing 2009 research directed by University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health Professor Michael Jerrett. The study purportedly tracked 448,000 people and claimed to find a connection between long-term ozone exposure and death.

Other researchers sharply criticized Jerrett’s work. His study made questionable assumptions about ozone concentrations, did not rely on clinical tests, ignored the findings of other studies that found no significant link between ground-level ozone and health effects, and failed to gather critically important information on the subjects’ smoking patterns, they pointed out. When they asked to examine his data, Jerrett refused.

Michael Honeycutt, chief toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, says Jerrett and EPA exaggerate health risks from ozone. The Texas Public Policy Foundation told EPA the agency needs to consider “the totality of studies on this issue, rather than giving exclusive weight to a single study,” the foundation emphasized. Unfortunately, EPA almost always focuses on one or two analyses that support its regulatory agenda – and ignores any that might slow or derail its onrushing freight train.

Even worse, those lost jobs and GDP result in major impacts on the lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards, health, welfare and life spans of millions of Americans. And yet, EPA steadfastly refuses to consider these regulatory impacts: for ozone, carbon dioxide, soot, mercury and other rules.

Then there is the matter of outright deception, collusion and fraud at EPA, via these and other tactics.

One such tactic is sue-and-settle lawsuits. Agitator groups meet with EPA officials behind closed doors and agree on new rules or standards. The agency then conveniently misses a deadline, “forcing” the activists to sue. That leads to a court hearing (from which impacted parties are excluded), and a judgment “forcing” the agency to issue new regulations – and even pay the agitators’ attorney fees! American Lung Association, NRDC, Sierra Club and EPA sue-and-settle collusion resulted in the new ozone proposal.

This clever sue-and-settle tactic was devised by none other than John Beale – the con artist who’s now in prison for bilking taxpayers out of $1 million in salary and travel expenses for his mythical second job as a CIA agent. It defies belief to assume his fraudulent propensities did not extend to his official EPA duties as senior policy advisor with his boss and buddy Robert Brenner, helping Ms. McCarthy and her Office of Air and Radiation develop and implement oppressive regulations. Indeed, his own attorney says he had a “dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior” and “manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives.” A US Senate report details the sleazy practice.

As to the “experts” who claim lower ozone limits are vital for protecting public health, there’s this.

The American Lung Association supports the EPA health claims – but neglects to mention that EPA has given the ALA $24.7 million over the past 15 years. Overall, during this period, the ALA received $43 million via 591 federal grants, and Big Green foundations bankrolled it with an additional $76 million. But no one is supposed to question the ALA’s credibility, integrity or support for EPA “science.”

EPA also channels vast sums to its “independent” Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which likewise rubberstamps the agency’s pollution claims and regulations. Fifteen CASAC members received over $181 million since 2000. CASAC excludes from its ranks industry and other experts who might question EPA findings. Both EPA and CASAC stonewall and slow-walk FOIA requests and deny requests for correction and reconsideration. Even congressional committees get nowhere.

As Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House on Science, Space and Technology Committee, noted in a letter, 16 of the 20 CASAC members who “peer-reviewed” the ozone studies also helped to write the studies. That makes it even less likely that their reviews were “independent.”

That Senate report, The Chains of Environmental Command, also notes that the Obama EPA has been deliberately packed with far-left environmental activists who work with their former Big Green colleagues to shape policy. They give radical groups critical insider access and also funnel millions of taxpayer dollars through grants to their former organizations, often in violation of agency ethics rules.

These arrogant, unelected, unaccountable, deceitful, dictatorial elites think they have a right to impose ozone, carbon dioxide, ObamaCare and other diktats on us, “for our own good.” They are a primary reason American businesses and families are already paying $1.9 trillion per year to comply with mountains of federal regulations – $353 billion of these costs from EPA alone. The damage to jobs, livelihoods, liberties, living standards, health and welfare is incalculable.

The next Congress should review all EPA data, documents and decisions, root out the fraud and collusion, and defund and ultimately reverse all regulations that do not pass muster. The principle is simple: No data, honesty, transparency or integrity – no regulation, and no taxpayer money to impose it.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

Editor's Note:  In line with this article I thought posting this 2007 "Blast From the Past" would be worthwhile.  Please enjoy $cience Mag Jumps on Global Moneywagon.

Observations From the Back Row, 4-9-11

Rich Kozlovich

Obama finally embraces malaria victims — as political pawns

U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Rajiv Shah and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson win this week’s award for cynicism. In his column today (“When cuts lead to coffins“),  Gerson wrote:

So far in the budget debate, the Obama administration has drawn few bright lines, preferring to blur distinctions with concessions. But last week, a neon line was drawn by an unlikely administration official. Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, possesses the mildest of manners. Testifying before the House state and foreign operations subcommittee, however, Shah had this to say: “We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying. Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back, specifically…”

Apparently oblivious to the tens of millions who have been killed, and billions who have been stricken by malaria — including about one million children who die annually — courtesy of the 1972 U.S. EPA ban on DDT, Shah and Gerson are now surfing the malaria tragedy (with phony statistics) for the purpose of launching a political attack on budget-cutting Republicans.

My Take – All of a sudden they are worried about the poor children of the third world! Let’s put the DDT issue aside and come to a realization that for decades not a peep was heard from this crowd against the greenies while they worked against every form of development in these third world nations. They have worked to prevent hydroelectric dams from being built; they have convinced third world leaders to totally reject Genetically Modified Foods; they convinced leaders that chlorine was unhealthy in public water systems. They have promoted everything that is detrimental to growth and good health. And over these decades when did this crowd ever stand up to the greenies and say, “Enough! You are killing millions of children with the policies you promote!” Never! Now all of a sudden they are worried about the children.

Everything is the Basics!
The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown. Is this time any different? Not much. All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudulent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place. Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so). No reforms were made on Wall Street. Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed.

My Take - As one reader, Miguel Barrientos pointed out; It's not only oil. If you look at the prices of most commodities they are all at record highs or near the levels last seen around May of 2008. Check out [this site] to explore 30 year price history data.

It has also been pointed out that the entire Middle East is erupting at the same time. Why? What is the single driving force for such actions? These people have lived under tyrants and despotic rulers for centuries. Are we to believe they all came to have an overwhelming desire for democracy at the same time? This is in reality all about the price of energy and food. And the price of food has increased dramatically all over the world because we are turning food into gasoline. This was all about making first world greenies feel good about themselves, and now they are against biofuels because they say it is even more environmentally unfriendly than oil. That is always the problem with these promoters of the latest philosophical flavor of the day. They don’t really know what they are talking about. As a result they have no clue as to the outcome and when it turns sour they move on and leave devastation in their wake. They never have to pay the penalty for being wrong. It is time that is changed.

A lot of hot air: Wind farms 'working at just 21% of capacity'
Britain's wind farms produce far less electricity than their supporters claim – and cannot be relied upon to keep the lights on, a study from a conservation charity showed yesterday.  A damning report from the John Muir Trust found the UK’s heavily subsidised wind farms were working at just 21 per cent of capacity last year. Yet the renewable energy industry claims their turbines work at 28 to 30 per cent efficiency on average.  The Trust also found that for extended periods all the UK’s wind turbines linked to the National Grid muster less than 20 megawatts of energy at a given point, enough power for fewer than 7,000 households to boil their kettles.

My Take – Another stupid greenie promotion….and the greenies lie, but even if their lies weren’t lies……that still doesn’t generate the energy necessary for their society. These people have been so consistently wrong for so many decades it is mind boggling that anyone listens to them. We have lost our minds.

Arctic ozone levels in never-before-seen plunge
Long a consideration in the Antarctic, ozone levels in the Arctic are now a cause for concern. The ozone layer has seen unprecedented damage in the Arctic this winter due to cold weather in the upper atmosphere. By the end of March, 40% of the ozone in the stratosphere had been destroyed, against a previous record of 30%.  The ozone layer protects against skin cancer, but the gas is destroyed by reactions with industrial chemicals. These chemicals are restricted by the UN's Montreal Protocol, but they last so long in the atmosphere that damage is expected to continue for decades…

"That doesn't say much for the effectiveness of the ban on CFCs, does it? But it's nonsense anyway. The "hole" varies wildly from year to year. And if the present hole is unprecedented, that only means that records don't go back far enough. And guess what they are blaming the hole on now? COOLING! Ya gotta laugh." -John Ray

Here is more from John Ray - Did the ozone hole PRECEDE CFCs?

Brazilian geologist Geraldo Lino [geraldo@msia.org.br] draws attention to two old papers that show that the hole goes back a long way. The papers are:

R. Penndorf, “The annual variation of the amount of ozone over northern Norway”, Annales de géophysique, tome 6, fasc. 1, 1950, pp. 4-9.

P. Rigaud and B. Leroy, “Presumptive evidence for a low value of the total ozone content above Antarctica in September, 1958”, Annales Geophysicae, 1990, 8(11), pp. 791-94.)

Lino says:  Both papers, one from 1950 and the other from 1990, suggest that such extreme rarefactions of the stratospheric ozone concentrations (below 150 dobson units) that became later known as the "ozone hole" were quite common over Northern Norway and also Antarctica, even before the CFCs were largely used (or invented, in the Norwegian case, inasmuch as the measurements there started three years before the invention of the CFCs by Thomas Midgley in 1929).

One of the authors, American meteorologist Randolph Penndorf, even uses the term "holes" to explain such low ozone readings. For me it's enough evidence that this is another natural phenomenon.

My Take - Does anyone know what ozone is? It is an O3 molecule that is created by the sun’s rays crashing into the oxygen molecules of the Earth’s atmosphere, and fortunately it has a relatively short half life because it is being created by this process all the time.

So how then can there be too little or too much? The amount of ozone is directly related to sunlight and oxygen. If we ever run out of oxygen or sunlight, or if for some reason the half life of ozone changes ….then we have a problem. Is there any reason to believe that CFC’s will change either of those scenarios? No! If not, we can never run out of ozone, and you have to ask; under these circumstances is there any reason to believe we can ever have too little or too much ozone? I would say no.

The reality of global warming and global cooling is related to the sun’s activity and doesn’t have a thing to do with CO2. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find that the ozone level is also related to that activity and doesn’t have a thing to do with CFC’s, and these shifting levels is within the natural margins?