EPA, Texas go to war over carbon-emission rules

EPA, Texas go to war over carbon-emission rules

by Ed Morrissey

The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday effectively declared Texas unfit to regulate its own greenhouse gas emissions and took over carbon dioxide permitting of any new or expanding industrial facilities starting Jan. 2.

“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a huge target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers by implementing unnecessary, burdensome mandates on our state’s energy sector, threatening hundreds of thousands of Texas jobs and imposing increased living costs on Texas families,” Katherine Cesinger, a Perry spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.

The EPA should be renamed the Economic Prevention Administration. We all want good quality air, land and sea but at what cost? We have some of the toughest regulation already of any developed country and that is both good and bad. The good side is that we pollute less the environment we live in but at the price of a higher manufacturing cost and unemployment. In a level playing field ( that we are not in ) it would not matter but the fact is that if we have too tight a regulation then the inevitable happens, we loose the production of the item to another country that does not have the regulation. When this happens we loose jobs and that creates another whole set of problems for us to deal with, therefore we must find some kind of balance that protects the environment and worker.

With the weak economy here in the US one of the last things we need are tougher regulations that will further strangle our businesses and move an already hurting manufacturing industry out of the country.