EDITORIAL: EPA’s chilling effect

The Washington Times ^ | January 4, 2013 | Editorial

[jazusamo]

Alaskan liberty goes up in smoke under new air regulations

Not-so-unintended consequences of overregulation are in the air. Newly adopted rules limiting airborne soot imposed by bureaucrats in Washington threaten to freeze the choices — and toes — of individuals living more than 4,000 miles away in subarctic Alaska. Thanks to authoritarian overreach, the freedom of America’s “last frontier” may not last much longer.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waited until after President Obama’s re-election to announce drastic new restrictions on soot produced by industry smokestacks, diesel trucks and even ordinary sources like wood-burning stoves. The new standard for the great outdoors reduces the legal limit for airborne fine-particle matter from 15 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 12 micrograms. To put in context how overly restrictive that is, secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed car can expose a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of soot per cubic meter, according to the agency.

The worst aspect of the agency’s one-size-fits-all scheme is that the same rules that purports to clean up the air above U.S. megalopolises apply to the 97,000 residents of Fairbanks and its surrounding county, tucked amidst the wilderness of central Alaska. In January, the average low temperature is 15-25 degrees below zero and many homes turn to wood stoves to keep their heating costs under control. The county had already been on the EPA’s “non-attainment area” list before the new regulations. Compliance will be even harder now.

[trebb]

The purpose of environmental laws is to make living so expensive for the peasants that we can't afford to continue doing so. I am not being facetious.

How else to amass everyone into easily controlled creches (big city slum tenements)? If they consolidate veryone into cities, they can make the current suburbs/ruaral areas into no-man lands and control travel and other Freedoms. I guess that, as they continue to rewrite history, they will have to purge the old "See the USA, in your Chevrolet" commercials to ensure even the memory of Freedom is hard to come by. God knows that the Chevrolet of the commercials has become a government entity and no longer stands for freedom of movement.

[upchuck]

Read the book Inside World by Robert Silverberg.

Welcome to Urban Monad 116. Reaching nearly two miles into the sky, the one thousand stories of this building are home to over eight hundred thousand people living in peace and harmony. In the year 2381 with a world population of over seventy-five billion souls, the massive Urbmon system is humanity’s salvation.

An Agenda 21 dream come true.

[Karliner]

The EPA is a commie plot. Alaskans and Inuits can’t comply. How could they enforce such rules in such open country?

[Jane Long]

Part of the communist/socialist agenda is to dictate *fairness and justice* via *environmental* laws.

[autumnraine]

I trust the metrosexuals to be capable of handling the terrain to TRY to enforce it.

[TexasTransplant]

I’m no expert in Metrosexuals so I guess I’ll just take your word on that.

TT

[autumnraine]

You do know that was sarcasm? I forgot my /s tag. Long work day...

[usconservative]

and even ordinary sources like wood-burning stoves.

I heat my home with a wood burning stove. I frankly don't give a damn' how much "soot" it puts out and I defy some numbnut from the EPA to try telling me I cannot use it anymore.......

[jazusamo]

I hear ya!