Last week, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., lobbed two anti-baloney missiles into the armored underbelly of President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency.
One was a new report eviscerating the sugar-coated cost estimates from EPA’s Clean Air Act regulations. The other was a Senate oversight hearing that exposed the deceptive methods the agency uses to calculate the benefits of regulating mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Obama’s EPA has made extravagant claims about its regulations. A March 2011 news release on their proposed Mercury Air Toxics Rule said, “This rule will provide employment for thousands by supporting 31,000 short-term construction jobs and 9,000 long-term utility jobs.” A recent publicity sheet said, “This rule will prevent 100,000 asthma attacks, and 5,000 heart attacks, and up to 11,000 premature deaths each year.”
Sen. Barrasso’s 10-page report, “Red Tape Making Americans Sick,” goes where no EPA wonk has gone before — into scientific studies of the link between regulation, unemployment and worsening public health.
The report cites a network of scientific sources confirming that unemployment from EPA regulations increases the likelihood of hospital visits, illnesses and premature deaths due to joblessness, thus increasing health care costs and raising questions about the claimed health savings of EPA’s regulations.
While the report’s premise is simple — EPA rules cost Americans their jobs and their health — it is more complicated to make that case to the public. Last week’s Senate oversight hearing on the mercury rule dovetailed with Sen. Barrasso’s report, providing a stage on which to make his case by questioning the EPA’s top air quality officer.
Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator of the EPA’s air quality office, may look grandmotherly, but she’s the tough and brainy darling of Big Green’s Washington denizens. She knows Sen. Barrasso, the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, because he tried to block her confirmation in 2009.
Ms. McCarthy smoothly negotiated softball questions from Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del. and easily began her exchange with Sen. Barrasso’s mostly predictable forays into EPA’s dubious jobs and health numbers.
Then the senator veered off into what must have been unexpected terrain. He asked, “Has EPA ever done a cumulative impact analysis of all other proposed rules on coal-fired power plants?” He listed several rules, “the cumulative of coal ash, of cooling water intake structures, climate change, cross-state air pollution, as well as mercury reduction?”
McCarthy uncharacteristically stumbled: “We actually have done uh, a … a, our, our analysis, our economic analysis of the [indistinct] cost of state air pollution rules. The other rules that you identified have yet to be finalized.”
Barrasso must have realized he hit a nerve. “But EPA has not done a cumulative analysis?”
“We have not, no.”
Barrasso probed on, repeatedly asking some version of “why not?” McCarthy finally appeared to admit the inadequacy of EPA’s analytical prowess: “Unfortunately, the data and methodology associated with really calculating the costs associated with many of the toxic emissions reductions that will be achieved by these rules, we can’t calculate effectively.”
Then, a few moments of explanation later, McCarthy defended extravagant EPA claims of regulatory benefits, like the ones noted above: “I believe we have calculated benefits that far exceed the costs.”
Consider that juxtaposition: We can’t calculate effectively. I believe we have calculated benefits that far exceed the costs.
Now when you say to a friend, “The EPA makes me sick,” it’s not just a wisecrack. You’re also delivering a hard and observable fact.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
