Tag: epa

#rsrh Lisa Heinzerling forced out of EPA?

Well, it’s not like what Donald Rumsfeld leaving SecDef after 2006 was for the Left, but watching a hard Greenie like Lisa Heinzerling leave her position in the wake of the Great Shellacking is pretty good:

Lisa Heinzerling, the head of EPA’s policy office, will return to her position as a Georgetown University law professor at the end of the year, said EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan.

Within EPA, Heinzerling is one of the more dogmatic proponents of regulating greenhouse gases to the maximum extent possible under the Clean Air Act.

Via Hot Air: Ed wonders whether Heinzerling left under her own power, or was pushed. I’m guessing pushed: hardcore religious fanatics like Heinzerling are typically uninterested in being team players.  In a way, it’s a shame: watching her try to explain to an unsympathetic House investigation committee about why it’s suddenly necessary for the government to have regulatory power over our exhalations would have been fun to see.  Which is probably why the administration made her position carbon-neutral, the cowards.

Moe Lane

EPA’s Lisa Jackson admits responsibility to Gulf…

…by belatedly canceling a Democratic fundraising appearance:

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson has canceled her appearance at a Democrat fundraiser hours after Politico published a story detailing that engagement.

Jackson was scheduled to appear at a breakfast in Manhattan Thursday to benefit the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. An EPA spokesman noted that the appearance was scheduled before the oil spill occurred.

Continue reading EPA’s Lisa Jackson admits responsibility to Gulf…

EPA head to fundraise for DSCC while oil spreads.

Eating breakfast.

Priorities, folks: priorities.  Apparently Lisa Jackson figures that if Interior Dept CoS Tom Strickland could go white-water rafting while the oil spread, she can go raise money for the Democrats:

As the Obama administration struggles to contain the massive oil spill threatening the Louisiana coast, one of its top environmental officials will be the featured attraction at a fundraiser for Senate Democrats next week in Manhattan, at which donors are promised they can speak to her about their “issues of concern.”

I have an ‘issue of concern:’ the Governor of Louisiana is shouting at the federal government to sign off on emergency sand berms to keep the oil away from wetlands; and the administration is dithering. So, several questions, here:

  • When was the EPA planning to help with that?
  • Was the EPA planning to help with that at all?
  • If it’s not… why?  I mean, I can guess, but the nicest answer implies rank partisanship on Jackson’s part, and rapidly degenerates from there.  And I mean really rapidly degenerates.

Lisa Jackson can answer these at her leisure: after all, it’s not like there’s an acute ecological crisis going on right now…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

If you are an industrialist who contributed to Democrats… [UPDATED]

…here is your reward:

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded greenhouse gases are endangering people’s health and must be regulated, signaling that the Obama administration is prepared to contain global warming without congressional action if necessary.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson scheduled a news conference for later Monday to announce the so-called endangerment finding, officials told The Associated Press, speaking privately because the announcement had not been made.

And by ‘reward’ I mean of course ‘betrayal.’  The intention here is to use the EPA to impose by executive fiat what the Senate has sensibly refused to do by legislative action: use the Clean Air Act to shut down businesses that they don’t like.  And, given that the dislike is based on religious grounds – and much, much, much worse; the people with the religious objections don’t see themselves as being religious – forget about trying to compromise.  The ‘compromise’ is that the industrialists don’t go to jail, a monastery, or the gibbet*.

In short: elections have consequences.  Here, have some.

Moe Lane

(H/T: AoSHQ)

*Obviously, being burned at the stake isn’t really carbon-neutral.

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) summed up my reaction to this pretty nicely:

“With double-digit unemployment and over 3.5 million jobs already lost this year, the administration inexplicably continues to push for a job-killing national energy tax—either through legislation or regulation.”

GM’s environmental quid pro quo.

(H/T: Instapundit) I am honestly surprised to find that there are people surprised by this.

Among those clamoring for attention and payouts from Motors Liquidation Co., the company that assumed General Motors’ unwanted assets after its Chapter 11 filing, are the environmental and economic redevelopment departments of state governments. According to reports, when GM exited bankruptcy, its polluted factory and land sites were consumed by the Motor Liquidation, allowing the automaker to avoid the responsibility of cleaning up its mess, and state leaders fear there won’t be any money to clean the locations.

After all, this was the original point of the exercise.  GM was an unsustainable, debt-ridden mess; the government takeover and bankruptcy was designed to let it cut out the most diseased portions of its operations and reorganize as something more… ‘untainted,’ as it were.  Or possibly even just ‘less tainted.’  That this ends up with individual state governments left holding the bag on the cleanup* is either an unintended consequence, or just a previously-obscure detail, of the bailout/bankruptcy; it all depends on whether you see the administration as a collection of dangerous idiots, or as a collection of dangerous idiots.  A federal bailout of the state governments’ obligations to clean up a private industry’s ecological mess would certainly be a useful weapon in the federal government’s ongoing quest for ever-more power and oversight.

On the other hand, the White House can’t even spell “Barack Obama” reliably on official state documents, so it’s entirely possible that they stuck already-struggling states with the cleanup bill by the sheerest accident. Continue reading GM’s environmental quid pro quo.

White House’s ‘Blame Bush’ reflex embarrasses them, EPA.

More than usual, that is.

It goes like this (H/T & links via Ed Driscoll and OpenMarket.org).

A memo from the EPA surfaced a while back that mentioned in passing that regulating greenhouse gasses to the extent desired by the most fervent global warming believers might have an adverse effect on the impious, too:

In contrast, an endangerment finding under section 202 may not be not the most appropriate approach for regulating GHGs. Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the CAA for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities. Should EPA later extend this finding to stationary sources, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulatory programs such as New Source Review.

As this was somewhat alarming, once you translated it into Standard English, the White House eventually started a little pushback that no, they wouldn’t be junking the entire American economy just quite yet.  So far, so good: after all, you don’t need to be a conservative to know that the government produces a lot of unfortunately relevant documents that later have to be eliminated and/or repudiated*. Continue reading White House’s ‘Blame Bush’ reflex embarrasses them, EPA.