EPA to drain $1 trillion from economy--Obama's new ozone policy is full of holes (Another outrage)

The zealots at the Environmental Protection Agency are poised to suck a trillion dollars and 7 million jobs out of the economy with an unnecessary and destructive change to pollution rules. Less than two years ago, the EPA set a ground-level ozone standard of 75 parts per billion (ppb), but Obama administration officials are looking to impose an even lower standard of 60 ppb by fiat. That seemingly small change will have sweeping effects throughout the economy.

Ozone is created when harmful emissions from cars and factories react with sunlight to create one of the building blocks of smog. Reasonable limitations on such pollutants are appropriate, but what the EPA proposes is far from reasonable. The likely standard is so low it approaches the natural background level of ozone found in many areas of the country. There is no new science compelling President Obama's team to change the rules, but they will have a significant impact on businesses still struggling to meet 2008 targets. Manufacturing plants already meet strict standards, but many will be forced to install expensive new equipment to reach the EPA's proposed levels. As all of the easy fixes for cleaning up emissions have been implemented already, incremental reductions come with a steep price tag. In the current rocky economy, imposing new costs is only going to thwart recovery.

I hear you, I really do, when you say you can’t stand anymore of this.

I feel somewhat isolated in this, and it sure does help to know there are others who feel the same way (Thank God for Free Republic)

I cannot speak to my wife about where I really think things are going. She is pretty non-political, but not a liberal. But she doesn’t get in my way of going to the events in Washington (9/12, GOE, etc) or driving down for a night with the DC chapter of FR outside Walter Reed. She knows it is important to me. But she doesn’t share the same dire outlook I have. Out of curiosity, I asked her the other day where she thought things were going. She answered that she thought things were going to get a bit worse, but would then get better. I am with her, for better or worse, and I am not free to do what I might under other circumstances. I must stay with her.

But my dark outlook is generated because I am much better read on historical matters than most people I know including my wife, so I know that that concept of people like us (relatively prosperous and well-fed right now) shivering in a New England house in the winter with no food or fuel, or maybe even no New England house, is not beyond the realm of possibility. I know all too well of the Eastern Europeans in the early forties who had fine houses filled with all the accoutrements of a good life who ended up homeless, walking down muddy roads in the middle of winter with no shoes, guided by a bayonet. They never dreamed they would end up there.

It can happen.

So, yeah. I feel pretty grim about it. Every single thing I do, I think that someday I will look back as having lived in the lap of unimaginable luxury. Cooking a dinner with food purchased from a store. Taking a hot shower. Filling the tank of my well maintained car with gas from a gas pump. Turning the heat in the house up a few degrees on a bitter winter day. Going out to a restaurant.

When I see what is going on, our government printing and spending trillions of dollars we don’t have, taxing us at rates that would have made serfs revolt, deliberately destroying industry, mandating that certain jobs (auto industry) are worthy of MY money being given to them, while denying others (oil industry) even the right to work, and I think “How have we come to this? How did we allow this to happen?”

When I am caught in the grip of dark, dark foreboding, I force myself to remember: It doesn’t HAVE to happen. Until it does, there is ALWAYS a way out. We can still take this country back, regain our liberties and freedom. There is a chance...as long as there is at least someone else who sees eye-to-eye with me on this, that can at least be an army of two.

And where there are two, there may be four. Or eight. And I realize that until they enslave us, we won’t be enslaved, and we can turn it around.

That is very well stated. Every time I turn on my computer, I think of it as lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. When I see posts like yours, I remind myself that for each one willing to publish his thoughts, there are at least a dozen others who are reading and resonating with them, although we may not hear from them publicly.

The EPA and its enabling legislation needs to be gutted and completly revamped as a true department administering proper legally legislated laws.

It has become a dictatorship unto itself having no relation with Constitutional process. It develops its own needs and agendas seperate from Congress, it institutes controls by fiat and doles out regulations, laws and fines as a power disregarding the true legislative process. It has become staffed with agenda driven activists and now administrators and regulators.

Tear it apart and do so by written law hamstringing its out of control behavior.

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