EPA: Hey, sorry about that whole “crucify” thing, we’re all about being ethical

Hot Air ^ | 10:41 am on April 26, 2012 | by Ed Morrissey

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The EPA has scrambled to contain the damage from the clip highlighted by Morgen Richmond this morning, which went viral yesterday, showing an EPA administrator bragging about crucifixion as a means to impose the EPA’s will on American subjects, er, citizens.  The EPA’s Richard Armendariz apologized late last night for his remarks, and the EPA rushed to assure people that they are all about “ethical enforcement”:

The Obama-appointed Environmental Protection Agency official who explained that the agency uses a “crucify them” enforcement philosophy against oil and gas companies apologized for his comments on Wednesday night.

“I apologize to those I have offended and regret my poor choice of words,” Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller. “It was an offensive and inaccurate way to portray our efforts to address potential violations of our nation’s environmental laws. I am and have always been committed to fair and vigorous enforcement of those laws. …

While Armendariz apologized, EPA Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Cynthia Giles asserted that the agency is still committed to ethical enforcement of the law.

“Strong, fair and effective enforcement of the environmental laws passed by Congress is critical to protecting public health and ensuring that all companies, regardless of industry, are playing by the same rules,” she said in comments provided to TheDC. “Enforcement is essential to the effectiveness of our environmental laws, ensuring that public health is protected and that companies that play by the rules are not at a disadvantage. The same holds true for companies involved in responsible and safe development of our nation’s domestic energy resources.”

Sure they are.  Why, just ask the Sacketts about the EPA’s idea of “ethical enforcement.”  They ruled that the land that the Sacketts bought were wetlands after the Sacketts starting building a house on residential-zoned land even though it had not been classified as such beforehand, and then refused to allow them to access the court system without paying tens of thousands of dollars each day that they delayed the EPA’s mandated abatement.  The Supreme Court hit the EPA with a unanimous smackdown on a process which could only be called a financial crucifixion of the Sacketts, and a lesson to everyone else — just as Armendariz described in the video.

Don’t count Senator James Inhofe among the easily impressed with this apology and endorsement of the EPA’s approach to enforcement:

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe is not buying the mea culpa offered by the EPA official who bragged about the agency’s “crucify them” enforcement philosophy against oil and gas companies.

“His apology was meaningless,” Inhofe told The Daily Caller in a Thursday morning interview.

“You’re going to treat people like the Romans crucified the church? Get real,” he said.

According to Inhoffe, Obama-appointed Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz’s claim in his apology that the agency is focused on “fair and vigorous enforcement” isn’t supported by the facts.

Inhofe appeared on Fox and Friends this morning to talk about his intent to investigate the EPA, and to tie Armendariz’ comments to Barack Obama’s war on domestic oil and gas production, especially gas:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Thursday blasted an Environmental Protection Agency official’s claim that the agency was using a “crucify them” strategy against oil and gas companies, calling it a part of President Barack Obama’s “war on domestic energy.”

“Let’s keep in mind, this is all a part of Obama’s war on domestic energy,” Inhofe said on “Fox & Friends.” “He’s the one who said that we have good natural gas and it’s plentiful and all of that but we’ve got to stop hydraulic fracturing. This is the war on hydraulic fracturing.”

It’s more than a war on hydraulic fracturing, or on energy production.  It’s a war on liberty, waged by bureaucrats who want to crucify people like the Sacketts in order to pacify the rest of us.  The apology won’t fool anyone.

[Mrs.Z]

He’s only sorry he let somebody tape him.

[madison10]

Too late. After Rush was all over this today, it’s just toooooo late.

[Michael Barnes]

The problem these a$$holes have is their rhetoric perfectly matches their act. They’ve been caught after the fact talking publicly about what they have been doing all along.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Rats keep digging their graves. Wanna bet he gets thrown under the bus?

[docbnj]

The guy is a total jerk, and also he doesn’t know history.

The Romans did not bother going after “little villages,” and the Turks were nowhere around the Mediterranean at the time. They were still off in Central Asia somewhere.

This EPA official obviously went to a public school. But where did he go to college? Let’s have names here!

[docbnj]

The guy is a total jerk, and also he doesn’t know history.

The Romans did not bother going after “little villages,” and the Turks were nowhere around the Mediterranean at the time. They were still off in Central Asia somewhere.

This EPA official obviously went to a public school. But where did he go to college? Let’s have names here!

[Jack Hydrazine]

SHUT DOWN THE EPA COMPLETELY!

[brownsfan]

And people here think it would be just as bad under Romney.

Wow, just wow.

[kcvl]

Al Armendariz

And not only has Armendariz talked about crucifying oil companies, he’s tried to do it. In 2010 his office targeted Range Resources, a Fort Worth-based driller that was among the first to discover the potential of the Marcellus Shale gas field of Pennsylvania — the biggest gas field in America and one of the biggest in the world. Armendariz’s office declared in an emergency order that Range’s drilling activity had contaminated groundwater in Parker County, Texas. Armendariz’s office insisted that Range’s hydraulic fracking activity had caused the pollution and ordered Range to remediate the water. The EPA’s case against Range was catnip for the environmental fracktivists who insist with religious zealotry that fracking is evil. Range insisted from the beginning that there was no substance to the allegations.

Press Here

The former professor at Southern Methodist University is a diehard environmentalist, having grown up in El Paso near a copper smelter that reportedly belched arsenic-laced clouds into the air. (Here’s a profile of him in the Dallas Observer.) Texas Monthly called him one of the 25 most powerful Texans, while the Houston Chronicle said he’s “the most feared environmentalist in the state.”

Nevermind that he couldn’t prove jack against Range. For a year and a half EPA bickered over the issue, both with Range and with the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas drilling and did its own scientific study of Range’s wells and found no evidence that they polluted anything. In recent months a federal judge slapped the EPA, decreeing that the agency was required to actually do some scientific investigation of wells before penalizing the companies that drilled them. Finally in March the EPA withdrew its emergency order and a federal court dismissed the EPA’s case.

[Hardraade]

Too late to be sorry. He scr*wed #BigguDickus right out of the water.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K8_jgiNqUc

[Army Air Corps]

Here is his condensed CV.

[BitWielder1]

“I apologize to those I have offended and regret my poor choice of words,”

Translation: "I apologize that you had to hear something that was not meant for public consumption and I regret I got caught."

(I for one believe he said exactly what he meant.)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Just posted this:

Jim Inhofe rips EPA’s ‘crucify’ approach

****************************EXCERPT************************************************

Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, had announced on Wednesday that he was launching an investigation into an EPA official’s comments from 2010 that were caught on tape, in which he compared the agency’s enforcement policies to how the Romans used to “crucify” people.

[kcvl]

talk from the guy these environmentalists still affectionately call “Dr. Al,” activist Allison Silva—who heads a group fighting a proposed coke-fired coal power plant in Corpus Christi—echoes a common sentiment about Armendariz for the crowd: “He’s a rock star in my book.”

the most feared environmentalist in Texas, telling a story about when he was just a kid in El Paso, surrounded by the arsenic-laced cloud of the Asarco copper smelter, one of the lucky ones among generations of children who, many studies later showed, were poisoned by the plant.

“You could taste the air,” he recalls for the crowd. “Your throat would tingle with all the metals that were put into the air.”

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-03-10/news/toxic-avenger-in-the-war-between-the-feds-and-texas-epa-chief-al-armendariz-has-science-on-his-side-is-that-enough/

[Army Air Corps]

Ping.

[Fiji Hill]

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years

Problem is, there were no Turkish towns in the Mediterranean basin until the eleventh century AD at the earliest, long after AD 337, when the Romans abandoned crucifixion.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Wonder how cool he will look when he goes before Sen Inhofe?

[Buckeye McFrog]

if the fallout from this is EPA finally gets de-funded, his fellow enviro-wonks will be hanging him in effigy, if not in person.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi