The question is, are we a country of laws made by our representatives, or a country of laws made by bureaucrats? The constitution provides only one answer, and Ms. Jackson would do well to read it.
Latest News release from the EPA:
CONTACT:
EPA Press Office
February 9, 2011
Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, Opening Statement Before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power
As prepared for delivery – Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify about Chairman Upton’s draft bill to eliminate portions of the Clean Air Act, the landmark law that all American children and adults rely on to protect them from harmful air pollution.
The bill appears to be part of a broader effort in this Congress to delay, weaken, or eliminate Clean Air Act protections of the American public. I respectfully ask the members of this Committee to keep in mind that EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saves millions of American children and adults from the debilitating and expensive illnesses that occur when smokestacks and tailpipes release unrestricted amounts of harmful pollution into the air we breathe.
Last year alone, EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saved more than 160,000 American lives; avoided more than 100,000 hospital visits; prevented millions of cases of respiratory illness, including bronchitis and asthma; enhanced American productivity by preventing millions of lost workdays; and kept American kids healthy and in school.
EPA’s implementation of the Act also has contributed to dynamic growth in the U.S. environmental technologies industry and its workforce. In 2008, that industry generated nearly 300 billion dollars in revenues and 44 billion dollars in exports.
Yesterday, the University of Massachusetts and Ceres released an analysis finding that two of the updated Clean Air Act standards EPA is preparing to establish for mercury, soot, smog, and other harmful air pollutants from power plants will create nearly 1.5 million jobs over the next five years.
As you know, Mr. Chairman, the Supreme Court concluded in 2007 that the Clean Air Act’s definition of air pollutant includes greenhouse gas emissions. The Court rejected the EPA Administrator’s refusal to determine whether that pollution endangers Americans’ health and welfare.
Based on the best peer-reviewed science, EPA found in 2009 that manmade greenhouse gas emissions do threaten the health and welfare of the American people.
EPA is not alone in reaching that conclusion. The National Academy of Sciences has stated that there is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that the climate is changing and that the changes are caused in large part by human activities. Eighteen of America’s leading scientific societies have written that multiple lines of evidence show humans are changing the climate, that contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science, and that ongoing climate change will have broad impacts on society, including the global economy and the environment.
Chairman Upton’s bill would, in its own words, repeal that scientific finding. Politicians overruling scientists on a scientific question– that would become part of this Committee’s legacy.
Last April, EPA and the Department of Transportation completed harmonized standards under the Clean Air Act and the Energy Independence and Security Act to decrease the oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of Model Year 2012 through 2016 cars and light trucks sold in the U.S.
Chairman Upton’s bill would block President Obama’s plan to follow up with Clean Air Act standards for cars and light trucks of Model Years 2017 through 2025. Removing the Clean Air Act from the equation would forfeit pollution reductions and oil savings on a massive scale, increasing America’s debilitating oil dependence.
EPA and many of its state partners have now begun implementing safeguards under the Clean Air Act to address carbon pollution from the largest facilities when they are built or expanded. A collection of eleven electric power companies called EPA’s action a reasonable approach focusing on improving the energy efficiency of new power plants and large industrial facilities.
And EPA has announced a schedule to establish uniform Clean Air Act performance standards for limiting carbon pollution at America’s power plants and oil refineries. Those standards will be developed with extensive stakeholder input, including from industry. They will reflect careful consideration of costs and will incorporate compliance flexibility.
Chairman Upton’s bill would block that reasonable approach. The Small Business Majority and the Main Street Alliance have pointed out that such blocking action would have negative implications for many businesses, large and small, that have enacted new practices to reduce their carbon footprint as part of their business models. They also write that it would hamper the growth of the clean energy sector of the U.S. economy, a sector that a majority of small business owners view as essential to their ability to compete.
Chairman Upton’s bill would have additional negative impacts that its drafters might not have intended. For example, it would prohibit EPA from taking further actions to implement the Renewable Fuels Program, which promotes the domestic production of advanced bio-fuels.
I hope this information has been helpful to the Committee, and I look forward to your questions.
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h/t to WUWT reader Michael C. Roberts
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Lisa Jackson’s statement is all spin and no substance, an enormous bubble of hubris, factoids (which are built to superficially resemble facts but are not facts themselves, think humanoids v humans) and hot air. The US Congress desperately needs a full-time Repeal Commission to get rid of overblown and out-of-control elements components of the Civil Service such the EPA.
@Bob Barker; Yep, spot on. It reminds me of when I worked on the lawn crew at a government hospital back in my college days. They had a whole pile of insecticide that they had not used and had no reason to use. But, of course, if they did not use it, they would not get as much next year. Solution: Send a bunch of teenagers without protective clothes on to spread the insecticide all over the lawn and use it up. Not that this is confined to government, but still.
Facts are irrelevant. This is/was a budget meeting.
As you know, Mr. Chairman, the Supreme Court concluded in 2007 that the Clean Air Act’s definition of air pollutant includes greenhouse gas emissions.
Did the court establish which gases were being emitted by greenhouses?
If the Administration via the EPA were truly concerned about “CO2 pollution” then they would ban the use of gas powered autos and trucks ….. oh wait, that is their underhanded goal now isn’t it?
She’s spinning it, trying to claim and make it look like they want to regulate all pollutants and kill the children….
…no one has even gotten sick, died, or even gagged from CO2
Yup, the fatalities from air pollution are so numerous in Toronto (thank you, Ohio Valley), we have to stack the bodies like cord-wood in the streets until spring arrives. (sarc.)
Ross McKitrick (of Hockey Stick fame) wrote an article about over-hyped air pollution fatalities in the Financial Post in 2004. Here are some excerpts:
“…….a new, peer-reviewed paper just published in the respected Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. The authors, economist Gary Koop and environmental scientist Lise Tole, are both at the University of Leicester in the U.K., but luckily for us, they used data from Toronto. The title of their paper is the very model of British understatement: “Measuring the Health Effects of Air Pollution: To What Extent Can We Really Say that People are Dying from Bad Air?” If I’d found the results they got, I’d have chosen a title like: The Death Rate from Air Pollution in Toronto is a Big Fat Zero.
The key problem: Many researchers report results from their statistical models without properly accounting for the uncertainty in the specification of the model itself.”
There’s that word “models,” again…
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/smogdeaths.pdf
For those interested, the UMass/Ceres report mentioned in the text:
http://www.ceres.org/epajobsreport
Ceres (pronounced “series”) is a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with companies and investors to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change.
Are these people really so myopic and uni focused? The hubris is unbelievable. Touting the fact that new regulations means new jobs! Of course, but at the expense of untold multiples of jobs lost and better opportunities missed. The EPA’s stance is the same as the IRS’. Obviously if the federal government eliminated income tax and switched to a Fair Tax or similar scheme, we would eliminate thousands, probably millions of jobs of tax prepares and IRS agents and accountants. While that would be bad for those few, the rest of us would save billions of dollars NOT spending on compliance and unimaginable hours saved NOT preparing our tax returns nor assembling the mountains of records required to do so.
Yes, Ms. Jackson, eliminating horses as required transportation will hurt the buggy whip industry, but we will all be better off due to the commensurate loss of horse manure in our streets.
The most dangerous substance to our children is administratium, and your organization is full of it. EPA and its oppressive regulation is far more harmful to our children than pollution ever was.
Look at your own information, Ms. Jackson, http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/images/comparison70.jpg
(Note the change in the time scale before the dashed line.) Note that we have made continuous gains in air quality and cleanliness. We have passed the point of diminishing returns, and now what you do causes more harm than good.
Regarding CO2 as a pollutant, well, O2 is far more harmful. Corrosion costs the US approximately twice what you claim the “environmental technologies industry and its workforce” makes for us–your inflated, exaggerated claims, for an industry required by law rather than actual human needs. An industry, that no doubt, would still exist, but be more efficient and consumer driven if not for the government meddling. http://www.nace.org/content.cfm?parentid=1011¤tID=1045 http://events.nace.org/library/corrosion/Principles/Cost.asp
And, that does not even count fire! Please tell me, Ms. Jackson, how many lives would be saved if you could eliminate fire. Remember: fuel, oxygen, and heat. If the EPA will simply ban oxygen, we can rid ourselves forever of the horrors and devastation of fire and corrosion!
Of course, water plays its role, and it accounts for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of direct deaths each year as well.
Why do you not regulate H2O and O2, Ms. Jackson? The finding of harm to our citizenry is undeniable! All science agrees; all practical experience of everyman agrees! We all know how dangerous water and oxygen are! Why not regulate and ban? Of course, there is the small matter that these compounds are essential ingredients of life itself, as is carbon dioxide!
Please stop playing us for fools Ms. Jackson. We know you are simply a bureaucrat, trying to protect your job, no your kingdom. Conflict of interest.
Again, please, disband the EPA. Our children’s lives and welfare depend on it!
Yeah, that nasty CO2. From the climate is not made from weather events department:
… Record low temperatures fall across the area for February 10th…
Wichita Kansas mid continent airport: the temperature plunged to a
record low of -17 degrees during the morning of February 10th. This
shatters the previous record of -5 degrees set in 1980.
Salina kansas: the temperature plunged to a record low of -15
degrees during the morning of February 10th. This breaks the
previous record of -11 degrees set in 1905.
Russell kansas: the temperature fell to a record low of -10 degrees
during the morning of February 10th. This breaks the previous record
of -7 degrees set in 1981.
Chanute kansas: the temperature plunged to a record low of -15
degrees during the morning of February 10th.. this shatters the
previous record of -7 degrees set in 1980.
Note: the record low temperatures are preliminary and will not be
official until midnight. Temperatures could go a little lower around
sunrise today… or possibly this evening.
This is exactly the sort of illogical, political, non-scientific, sorry excuse for reasoning posing as science that we get these days.
“The bill appears to be part of a broader effort in this Congress to delay, weaken, or eliminate Clean Air Act protections of the American public. I respectfully ask the members of this Committee to keep in mind that EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saves millions of American children and adults from the debilitating and expensive illnesses that occur when smokestacks and tailpipes release unrestricted amounts of harmful pollution into the air we breathe.”
The strawman. Sorry, EPA. In telling you non-scientific bureaucrats that you cannot ply your politics on atmospheric CO2, you are being directed back to your proper duty regulating pollutants that cause illness and harm ‘the children’. Not away from, back to.
CO2 is not a pollutant, and no poor defenseless children are getting any illness from breathing in an increase in atmospheric CO2 that is orders of magnitude smaller than what they are already breathing out with every precious, cherubic exhalation.
On the contrary, when EPA wastes their limited budget tilting for windmills over CO2, they are failing to protect the children from actual pollutants.
Shame on you for trying to conflate the issue of global warming with illness causing pollution!
Oh, and by the way – Chairman Uptons bill does not repeal any scientific findings. What is being repealed is not a proper EPA finding, and it is not scientific.
You’ve heard of pigs flying, well if these guys keep on waving there hands around faster and faster i’m sure one or two of them will get a bit of a chicken flight going soon.
You could see Gore at one of his closed to the public and journo’s presentations waving his arms around so much he flys of the stage.
Although for the true shop stopper someone has to shed a crocodile tear at some point.
My question would be if CO2 concentrations in greenhouses is elevated to 1000ppm is there any peer reviewed studies of health problems in workers who have to work in these areas.I also understand naval submarine crews work in elevated CO2 environments.
There are two key powers that Congress has that the EPA and the Administration need to be made acutely aware of: Impeachment and Removal from Office, and the Power of the Purse. If Congress is serious about who and what governs this country there’s going to be a shoot out at the OK Corral that’s going to make history.
Give us a break Lisa, these two organizations are Soros funded astroturf set up in 2008 to counter long established organizations representing small businesses.
A simple Google search of their names revels they were very big in supporting Obamacare and Cap ‘n Trade since the 2008 elections.
The EPA is only the (very large) tip of an iceberg. National and state pols and ‘crats have been inserting “decarbonization” language into hundreds of bills and regulations, and cities are in on the act, too. My own city, Vancouver Canada, has an official goal of becoming the Greenest City on Earth, to which end they have or are contemplating a plethora of very expensive and frequently goofy regulations and projects.
And don’t get me started on the perversion and pollution of school curricula with “no pressure” New Truths and assumptions!
There’s going to need to be a long, thorough “unwinding” process when the CO2-is-good verity finally is driven home. And “Oops!” should not be an acceptable excuse by those who are doing it to us with the necessarily economy-crushing regs and remedies.
No charge? Defunding should not be a problem then.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court rejected requests for it to determine the science and emphasized EPA authority based on their determination. The problem, the court overlooked the fact that Congress never gave EPA authority to act on GHGs.
“Based on the best peer-reviewed science, EPA found in 2009 that manmade greenhouse gas emissions do threaten the health and welfare of the American people.”
Does anyone happen to know what “peer-reviewed science” EPA used to make the determination regarding CO2? I search later today to see if I can find it but thought someone might know.
If Congress is going to ask questions, it makes sense to start with the validity of the “peer-reviewed science” EPA is apparently using for the determination.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The SC wasn’t ruling on that issue, they were ruling along the lines if the EPA could legally declare anything unhealthy under the Clean Air Act(CAA). The court ruled that the CAA gave the EPA that authority. If Congress decides that the EPA cannot deal with CO2 it just passes legislation that says so, we’ll skip the circus that would ensue for now, and it will be Constitutional. Congress gave the power to the EPA to do as it pleases, it can also take it away.
From the department of pulling numbers out of the air (I think the Clean Air Act has a provision)….
“Last year alone, EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saved more than 160,000 American lives; avoided more than 100,000 hospital visits;…”
So at least 60,000 Americans would have died without visiting the hospital.
I’m sorry I thought our healthcare system was more efficient.
All the ‘new’ jobs she thinks will be created will be among the ‘Jobsworths’ and paper shufflers in the Bureaucracy. There won’t be a single ‘productive’ job arising from what she wants at all. As for her baloney about ‘lives saved’ – how were these calculated? Where were they calculated? I’m pretty sure a close examination will show that they are ‘numbers’ picked a random and probably closely related to areas where industries have been wiped out by these policies and regulations.
No industry, no pollution, no jobs – and maybe fewer deaths as well because the population has fallen as people moved in search of jobs.
This is what happens when well intentioned and probably useful and necessary Agencies fall into the hands of activists. They turn them into things they were never intended to be and make them the instrument of their own political and ideological agendas.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. The administration seems to think that government make work jobs will solve our unmployment woes. You shouldn’t complain, citizen, three times your current expenditures on energy should create a lot of jobs. Just think of the boon to the bicycle and coat industries. Morticians will make out like bandits during winters like this one.
Link to EPA proposals which are currently in various Rule Making stages: http://yosemite.epa.gov/opei/RuleGate.nsf/content/topicsair.html?opendocument
Regulations related to GHG vehicle emissions is in the proposal stage.
– 27 degrees in Bartlesville Ok Former world headquarters for Phillips Petroleum. If it wasn’t for the lovely strong hands of this woman, It would have been 50 below and frozen every water pitpe in Oklahoma.
We are so lucky. Now explain why we need little cars to increase auto deaths by 4,000 per year. will she fess up that every thousand pounds removed from a new cars weight increasees death rates geometrically?
“Last year alone, EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saved more than 160,000 American lives; avoided more than 100,000 hospital visits; prevented millions of cases of respiratory illness, including bronchitis and asthma; enhanced American productivity by preventing millions of lost workdays; and kept American kids healthy and in school.”
Well, last year there were no major EPA rules in force for GHGs, so rolling back EPA adventurism in this area will have no effect on those 160,000 Americans.