Despite court curbs, EPA regulators keep killing jobs, prosperity

As Obama promised, energy prices are soaring and federal regulator jobs have grown by 13%; EPA rules are on track to destroy 1.4 to 2.5 million private sector jobs by 2015, at a cost to the economy of nearly $7 trillion by 2029.

The real casualties of the Environmental Protection Agency’s relentless war against fossil energy use, and coal in particular, will be businesses, jobs and household energy budgets, with few if any, health benefits. Thankfully, an encouraging series of court decisions challenging EPA’s blatant overreaches are coming to the rescue.

A. As a recent example, on August 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the signature “Cross-State Air Pollution Rule” EPA enacted a year ago that was supposed to reduce air pollution emitted in one state and carried to another. The rule would have enabled the Obama administration’s EPA to order the upwind state to reduce emissions even beyond federal air quality standards.

Two of the three judges on the appellate panel determined that under the rule “…upwind states may be required to reduce emissions by more than their own significant contributions to a downwind state’s non-attainment. EPA has used the good neighbor provision to impose massive emissions reductions requirements on upwind states without regard to limits imposed by the statutory text.... ” Read more.........