Congressional lawmakers will press ahead with an investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive regulation of fossil fuel producers despite the resignation Monday of a top EPA official who claimed it is the Obama administration’s policy to “crucify” companies that don’t comply with those regulations.
The EPA disclosed Monday that a regional administrator in Dallas, Al Armendariz, resigned after it was disclosed last week that he talked in a 2010 video of making an example out of those who violate the EPA’s regulations.
“It is kind of like how the Romans used to conquer villages in the Mediterranean,” Armendariz said in the video, explaining the EPA’s enforcement technique. “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere and they’d find the first five guys they saw, they’d crucify ’em, and that little town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
The footage was first disclosed by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a global warming skeptic and the top Republican on the Senate energy committee, who called it proof of President Obama’s “war on domestic energy.”
Inhofe and other Republicans say they believe the EPA overreached in its enforcement, undercutting the nation’s domestic energy production.
Inhofe said Monday that he would continue his investigation into the EPA despite Armendariz’s resignation.
“His resignation in no way solves the problem of President Obama and his EPA’s crucifixion philosophy,” Inhofe said. “Armendariz was just being honest. His choice of words revealed the truth about the war that EPA has been waging on American energy producers under President Obama. ”
The House energy committee announced Friday that they would launch a separate investigation into the EPA’s regulation of fossil fuel producers. The panel sent a letter to Armendariz seeking detailed information about “the agency’s enforcement practices” and requesting that he testify before Congress.
“There are serious ongoing concerns about those practices and we have responsibility to conduct oversight,” a committee aide told The Washington Examiner.
Republicans point to the recent EPA decision to sue Range Resources, a Texas natural gas company that the EPA accused of contaminating well water in the northern part of the state, an area under Armendariz’s jurisdiction.
The company, which uses hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to capture oil and gas from rock, said they did not cause the well contamination and their claim was reinforced by the Texas Railroad Commission, which found the gas contamination stemmed from natural leakage and not fracking.
The EPA recently decided to drop the lawsuit against Range Resources.
“Administrator Al Armendariz’s comments are representative of the arbitrary and punitive enforcement strategy that has developed at the EPA in the last three years,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, which supports increasing domestic energy production.
Obama needed to be rid of Armendariz because Republicans were using the EPA official’s harsh rhetoric to undercut Obama’s claims that he was working to lower gasoline prices, said Michael Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Armendariz’s “crucify” speech “cuts against Obama’s narrative that oil and gas and increased domestic production are good for us,” Webber said. “It’s very counter to the kind of narrative he’s trying to put forward.”
