Regulation: The Environmental Protection Agency, which wraps itself in a green mantle of righteousness, once again has been found to be breaking the law. Before long, more people will realize the EPA is an outlaw government agency with a shocking disregard for the law.
Having been given sweeping and near-dictatorial powers by President Obama and the Supreme Court, the EPA has routinely exceeded its bounds and veered off into criminal behavior in some of its activities. In a report released this week, the EPA's own inspector general claims the agency has not sufficiently studied the environmental impact of blending ethanol with gasoline, as required by law.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, signed into law by President Bush, required the increased production of biofuels, in particular ethanol, and mandated it to be blended with gasoline.
It was a bad law to begin with, one that unfortunately was bipartisan in nature. As any mechanic worth his salt will tell you, ethanol use can do serious damage to car and truck engines.
More seriously, an Associated Press investigative report in 2013 found that corn-based ethanol was having far nastier impacts on the environment than predicted by the EPA and Energy Department. "The AP reported that with corn effectively subsidized, farmers put millions of acres of land formerly devoted to conservation into corn production, destroying animal habitats and polluting water supplies," the Truth About Cars website wrote this week.
Sound "green" to you?
Under the 2007 law, the EPA was supposed to produce a report every three years on whether adding corn-based ethanol to our gasoline supply had any benefits — but the EPA didn't do it. With its own inspector general saying it's breaking the law, the EPA — which did produce one report in 2011 — has now promised it will live up to the deal by producing a new study in 2017. Hey, it's only seven years overdue! But the EPA says the next one will come out in 2024 — another clear violation of the law.
Why hasn't the EPA produced the reports as required? It says it doesn't have the money to do more — even though, as the Truth About Cars site points out, the first study cost a piddling $1.7 million, while the EPA has a budget of more than $8.2 billion. The EPA also blamed its foot-dragging on Congress, because it didn't give "feedback" on its first report.
We wish we could say this is a one-off problem. But it isn't. There's a pattern of lawbreaking at the EPA that is alarming and — since the agency seems to exist out of reach of the law — even frightening.
In recent years, the EPA has committed a number of serious legal breaches, including:
- Former EPA chief Lisa Jackson created an imaginary administrator, "Richard Windsor," and gave him an email account. She then used that email address to conduct and hide controversial EPA work — again, out of the reach of the Freedom of Information Act, and a clear violation of the law.
- A 2014 report, again by the EPA's inspector general, found that the agency had actually done dangerous human experiments to test tolerance of various pollutants, without informing the participants of the dangers involved. As science writer Steve Milloy, who first reported on the illegal tests, noted, "EPA failed to tell these study subjects it believed the experiments could cause death."
- The Environment & Energy Legal Institute, a private watchdog, last year revealed "records showing illegal activities by EPA staff, colluding with certain environmental-group lobbyists, to draft EPA's greenhouse-gas rules behind the scenes and outside of public view." EELI Senior Attorney Chris Horner told the Daily Caller that the emails "prove beyond any doubt that EPA conducted its campaign to impose the global warming agenda unlawfully, making the rules themselves unlawful."
- The Government Accountability Office released a report late last year calling the EPA's social-media campaign for stringent water-use rules — which have drawn powerful opposition from the farming and energy industries -- "covert propaganda" and a violation of the law.
- Not learning from Lisa Jackson's experience, current EPA chief Gina McCarthy admitted she deleted thousands of texts on her phone, which was provided by the EPA. And just like Hillary Clinton, she claimed they were all "personal." The law is clear: None of these records is to be destroyed. Christopher Horner of the Washington Examiner has noted that all of the deletions came during Obama's "War On Coal." Who knows what was in them?
- EPA has been sued by New Mexico for its role in a Colorado mine disaster that led to the poisoning of drinking water from the discharge of nearly a million pounds of dangerous metals. If EPA had been a corporation, it likely would have been closed by now.
We could go on. The list of EPA infamy is a long one. The EPA is a rogue agency, operating outside all control, seemingly immune to the laws that the rest of us must follow or suffer the consequences. Given both the growing number of academic and think-tank studies that show the EPA's costs far outweigh its benefits and the agency's repeated acts of criminality, it's time to shut it down.
