Guest post by David Middleton
Key points:
- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must begin evaluating how many power plants and coal mining jobs are lost because of air pollution regulations, an analysis it hasn’t done in decades, a federal judge in West Virginia on Monday ordered.
- U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey ruled that the EPA is required by law to analyze the economic impact on a continuing basis when enforcing the Clean Air Act.
- EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has said no administration has interpreted the law to require job impact analysis for rulemaking since 1977, the order said.
The Clean Air Act (CAA) requires the EPA to analyze the economic impact of all regulations promulgated under the CAA. How in the Hell could the EPA analyze economic impacts without analyzing the impact on jobs? The EPA says that they have not analyzed job impacts since 1977. Assuming this ruling does not get overturned, every regulation promulgated under the CAA since 1977, might be subject to challenge… particularly the Clean Power Plan.
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From my experience in government it’s useless trying to ask departments to consider adverse economic impacts of their policies, partly because they don’t even collect such data.
But there is one good way to address this, incorporate other department’s data into inter-departmental reviews and reports. This usually provides more balance and forces departments to integrate and consider other government views.
‘Rogue’ departments only continue to be rogue where they are not counterbalanced by other equally legitimate departments, such as the EPA working together with primary industries, mines and energy resources etc. differing values can sometimes be fused into a more educated and balanced approach.
Excellent, thanks David.
This won’t amount to anything of course — data manipulation is their expertise.
runaround…they think that retraining for jobs that folks have no vested interest in,is ok… welfare and food banks are sufficient if folks do not respond in a manner they see as right…like…that is what they deserve..and that is the good ol’ american values at work ;)…work your ass off for someone that does not care then get pushed aside by someone that cares even less…
Waaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT ISN’T FAIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!