The Environmental Protection Agency is ignoring the public outrage against the unpopular cap-and-trade tax scheme and is trying to impose even more intrusive energy regulations on the American people by ignoring the entire democratic process alltogether.

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The Court did find that the “environmental benefit potentially achievable, our Nation’s energy needs and the possibility of economic disruption must weigh in the balance” when considering greenhouse gas regulations. However, instead of completely dismissing the idea they instead relied on a legal concept called displacement to find that because the EPA is moving to regulate GHGs the federal government has providence on the issue and thus common law nuisance suits are barred. This holding is both a blessing and a curse.

The Court doubled down on its flawed finding in Massachusetts v. EPA that Congress somehow authorized these GHG regulations in the Clean Air Act. Justice Ginsberg wrote, “the critical point is that Congress delegated to EPA the decision whether and how to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants; the delegation is what displaces federal common law [nuisance suits].” Justices Alito and Thomas wrote a concurring opinion expounding that they agreed with displacement theory only because no one in the case bothered to challenge the idea that EPA has the authority to regulate GHGs.

This decision does grant the economy a short reprieve from trial lawyers and environmental action groups that were chomping at the bit to haul GHG emitters into court seeking damages for the perceived harm of globally-mixed gases that are emitted by nearly every act of human existence, economic and otherwise. Conversely, it strengthens the hand of EPA bureaucrats who successfully invented authority to regulate global warming thanks to a novel legal theory from Carol Browner and now bolstered by two Supreme Court decisions: Massachusetts v. EPA and AEP v. Connecticut.

Congress must step in and clarify that it never gave EPA any authority to regulate GHGs and the Supreme Court was wrong in twice claiming that it did. Congress must also clearly state that courts are the wrong venue to set climate policy and that there is no common law nuisance action for emitting GHGs.

Phil Kerpen
June 9, 2011 4:00 A.M.

The debate over the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011, or NAT GAS Act, has focused mostly on the question of whether the federal government should use hefty subsidies — $64,000 per truck — to interfere with the free-market allocation of resources. On that point, a surprisingly large number of Republicans are siding with their central-planning-advocate colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

But why are so many Democrats enamored with big corporate-welfare giveaways to the natural-gas industry in the first place? The answer might be a little-noticed provision called “Section 403” that could clear the legal path for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pursue the Obama administration’s entire energy agenda via back-door regulations.

Read the rest at National Review Online.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should not just delay but outright end its greenhouse gas rules and other regulations designed to achieve a backdoor implementation of cap-and-trade. The American people decisively rejected energy taxes and rationing in the 2010 election, yet the administration has remaining committed to disregarding Congress and the American people.

Read the rest at NationalJournal.com.

“The Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to delay the implementation of the boiler MACT rules is a tacit admission that the rule will have a profound negative impact on the economy. Although the EPA attempted to shroud their delay in the cloak of needing “additional opportunities for public input,” the public has clearly spoken on this issue.

“The boiler MACT rules are so unachievable that even the EPA had to be dragged kicking and screaming by environmental pressure groups and a federal district court judge to publish the rules. There are currently thousands of industrial boilers that will need to retrofitted or replaced in order to comply with this rule. The rule would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs for no noticeable environmental benefit.

“It’s time for Congress to step in and state once and for all that boiler MACT is dead, and go further to stop the rest of the EPA’s job-crushing attack on American businesses and consumers.”

Published May 26, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Last summer, I wrote a piece in this space that posed a question: “Will New Jersey’s Chris Christie Do the Right Thing On Cap-and-Trade?” Today we got our answer, and it is a resounding yes!

In a press conference moments ago in Trenton, Christie announced his support for repealing the state’s cap-and-trade law and withdrawing from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 10-state regional compact in the Northeast that implements a cap-and-trade energy tax scheme from Maine to Maryland.

“It’s a failure,” Christie said today. “RGGI has not changed behavior and it does not reduce emissions.”

Read the rest at FoxNews.com Opinion.

Today, the U.S. House is expected to vote by a wide margin to stop the EPA’s job-crushing backdoor energy taxes.

Unfortunately it was a different story yesterday in the Senate, where 64 senators agreed the EPA must be stopped, but only 50 voted for the amendment that would actually stop them. The other 50 were able to sit on their hands and willingly allow the EPA to usurp the legislative responsibility with which voters entrusted them. Because of them, the vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and the EPA power grab will – at least for now – continue.

The good news is that half the Senate — including Democrats Joe Manchin (W. Va.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) — have said that the EPA should not be twisting the 1970 Clean Air Act into a vehicle for undemocratically pursuing sweeping energy tax regulations. The only Republican to vote no was Susan Collins (Maine).

Read the full article here:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/07/thanks-folks-senate-epas-power-grab-continues/

BY DAN SHAUL AND PHIL KERPEN
Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Will Sen. McCaskill stand up to the EPA, protect Missouri jobs and take responsibility as the legislative branch of government?

Read the op-ed at Columbia Daily Tribune.

Take Action! Call Sen. McCaskill at one of these numbers and tell her to vote YES on the McConnell Amendment:

Cape Girardeau: 573-651-0964
Columbia: 573-442-7130
Kansas City: 816-421-1639
Springfield: 417-868-8745
St. Louis: 314-367-1364
Washington D.C.: 202-224-6154

or go here to send an email!

For the past two weeks, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been scrambling to prevent Congress from doing its job and standing up to the Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming power grab.

Now he has a new way to rubber stamp the EPA’s agenda, while providing political cover for wavering Democratic senators. It’s called the Baucus amendment – proposed by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). And it’s a sham.

Read the rest at Politico.

Take Action! Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote YES on the McConnell Amendment or go here to send an email!

Let’s be clear on what is and is not at stake. This is not about the science of global warming, our disastrous overall energy policies, or how we feel about the country’s cherished environmental laws. It is about one thing and one thing only: Who decides? Who makes the laws? And therefore, does the Constitution still matter?

John Locke put it well in 1690 when he wrote:

The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands: for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others . . . The power of the legislative, being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.

Our founders clearly agreed when they wrote Article I, Section 1. Yet now we have a situation in which the EPA is intent on doing precisely what Congress and the American people already rejected when they shot down President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy tax bill. In Obama’s words, the day after the election: “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way.”

Indeed, the EPA is actively pursuing a bizarre legal theory that the 1970 Clean Air Act was designed as a global warming law, and that pursuant to it they can regulate just about everything that moves, as well as most industrial facilities. When it’s fully phased in, their plans include over 18,000 pages of appendices that would regulate every industry in the U.S., cause electricity prices to skyrocket, and greatly diminish our freedom and prosperity.

Unelected regulators are usurping the legislative power that the people, in the Constitution, granted to Congress. We must demand our senators step in and stop this regulatory tyranny.

The first test may come as soon as today on the McConnell Amendment. Is the EPA now the super-legislature of the United States? Or does the Senate still matter? Moreover, the constituents of any senator who votes to allow the EPA’s power grab to move forward should seriously reconsider whether it makes sense to re-elect a senator who chooses to delegate away his or her legislative powers.

Beyond today’s vote, we need fundamental reform. The most significant reform to check out-of-control regulators is the REINS Act, H.R. 10 in the House where it is sponsored by Rep. Geoff Davis and S. 299 in the Senate where it is sponsored by Rand Paul. Those two Kentuckians understand that Congress must take responsibility, and so their bill would require a vote of the legislative branch before major policy changes could take effect through regulation. Imagine that. Let’s make the legislators legislate.