Thousands of new highly skilled well-paying jobs at risk.
By Kathleen Hartnett White & Mario Loyola
Part one of a three-part series.
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas EPAs new rules in a host of areas are starting to freeze investment & job creation under a blanket of onerous new mandates that promise little environmental benefit. While the nation remains focused on other issues the Environmental Protection Agency has been engulfing vast areas of economic activity and long-held state authority with all the power speed & silence of a snowy mountain avalanche.
Americans should be proud of the gains weve made in protecting our environment since passing clean air legislation in the 1960s and 70s.
In just 30 years emissions of lead carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide (the main ingredient in acid rain) have mostly disappeared from our environment. Todays new vehicles emit 88 percent less nitrogen oxide (the key precursor of ozone) than cars and trucks 10 years older.
While most of the credit should go to cost-driven efficiencies and technological innovations EPA regulations that struck some balance between environmental and economic priorities played a major role.
But todays EPA is far more like an activist for whom no standard is too high no burden too onerous no risk too low and no science too speculative. Despite being a world center of energy production Texas has dramatically improved air
quality.
Yet it is disproportionately burdened by EPAs actions.
Houston long among the nations most polluted cities attained the nationally applicable ozone standard last year. If the real goal is ending the era of fossil fuels in our generation as President Obama has repeatedly declared Texas is a good place to start.
The Texas model of limited government and economic freedom which has created more jobs than the rest of the country put together in the last 12 months is also a threat to Obamas statist agenda.
Last July EPA invalidated the 16-year old Texas Flexible Permitting Program. A strategic mechanism for achieving huge emissions reductions the flexible permits impose tight emission caps for industrial facilities while leaving plant operators some flexibility to innovate.
Now purportedly because of concerns about specificity in the language of the permits EPA has thrown the operating authority of more than 120 of the largest facilities in Texas into legal limbo.
EPA has yet to explain how the state permitting rules should be changed to satisfy these newfound concerns but it has now imperiously decreed the Texas rules fall short of federal requirements. The affected facilities are in full compliance with state-issued permits but EPA views them in violation of the Clean Air Act and subject to enforcement.
As an alternative to full-blooded EPA enforcement or revocation of their permits EPA has offered a voluntary audit to conclude with an enforcement decree -- a coercive fist hidden inside a velvet glove. EPA has apparently
invented a new method of rulemaking through the threat of enforcement -- entirely outside the constraints of the Administrative Procedures Act.
Texas is now challenging EPAs invalidation of the Texas Flexible Permitting Program in federal court. EPAs action jeopardizes the planned construction of a new $6.5 billion Motiva refinery in Port Arthur and Totals planned $3 billion refinery expansion.
Thousands of new highly skilled and well-paying jobs are at risk. And its not just Texas that suffers.
EPAs heavy-handed response to a dispute over permit rules strikes at the heart of the states industrial base one of the vital engines of the U.S. economy. Texas produces more than 25 percent of the countrys transport fuel and more than 60 percent of its industrial chemicals. The state has become the countrys leading job creator.
Alas Texas is not the only target of the Obama administrations regulatory avalanche and it wont be the only victim.
Kathleen Hartnett White is former chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Mario Loyola directs the Center for 10th Amendment Studies at Texas Public Policy Foundation.
