The Environmental Protection Agency has been in the news a lot of late. Over the past few months, we have witnessed the hyperactive agency:
• Attempt to expand its authority over virtually every puddle and stream in the nation;
• Implement rules that could bankrupt an entire industry and allow Washington, D.C., to tell states what energy sources they can and cannot use; and, of course
• Provide the awful spectacle of turning one of Colorado’s most beautiful rivers the color of Tang.
And these are just the EPA’s activities that made headlines.
Say what you will, the EPA is certainly ambitious. No sooner does it enact a new set of rules to broaden its micromanagement over state and local economies, than it is brainstorming over what impossible-to-achieve mandate it can inflict next.
The latest target of the EPA’s bureaucratic fist is nothing less than the economy of two-thirds of the nation, including Colorado. This fall, the agency is expected slash the ground-level ozone cap from today’s less-than-a-decade-old standard of 75 parts per billion to somewhere between 65 and 70 ppb. Four years ago, even President Obama rejected this idea, fearing widespread economic damage. Such trivial concerns don’t discourage the EPA, however.
How will this impact Colorado? For starters, it will place much of the state — both on the Front Range and the Western Slope — out of attainment, in some cases for the first time ever. A recent report by the Center for Regulatory Solutions shows that 15 Colorado counties — comprising 89 percent of the state’s GDP and 85 percent of its workforce — will, arbitrarily and overnight, be in violation of this new bureaucratic standard. That means the federal government will effectively hold veto power over any economic activity within those counties that might conceivably emit something — in other words, pretty much any activity that creates something of value and pays a decent wage.
As the CRS report explains, Colorado will be impacted not only through lost jobs and incomes, but under a lower standard, much needed transportation infrastructure projects also will be delayed or even denied. It will matter very little if we as a state figure out a new funding mechanism to provide for transportation projects. As long as the places where those projects are most needed are kept out of attainment by the EPA, they will be kept bound up in the ever-gestating supply of federal red tape. Contemplate that as you enjoy your commute on Interstate 25.
Over the past several decades, Coloradans have made great strides toward improving air quality. We are at the point now where a considerable amount of the ozone being measured in the state is naturally occurring or drifting in from elsewhere — fires in Washington State, for instance, or, increasingly, from overseas. In fact, it is at the point where even the EPA has admitted that it has only identified one-third of the controls needed to achieve compliance with its own standards. The EPA is instituting standards it knows cannot be met, and threatening local economies if they are not.
To justify this agenda, the EPA and environmental groups repeatedly claim that they’re trying to reduce asthma cases. Roger McClellan, a former chairman of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, recently said this claim ignores more than a decade of public health data showing “asthma cases have increased by millions while ozone concentrations have declined.” So how does attacking someone’s source of income improve their health?
This is not a partisan issue. Elected officials at all levels and on both sides of the political spectrum recognize that, at least in this instance, the EPA is going too far. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado has said the proposal “doesn’t make sense on the ground.” Gov. John Hickenlooper was recently reported saying that he is not convinced that setting up a standard that cannot be met is the right direction to take, and that he remains concerned that Colorado is at a natural disadvantage.
He is right to be concerned. No matter the extent or success of Colorado’s own environmental initiatives, to the EPA it will never be enough. That begs the question: What might they do to us next?
Kelly Sloan is the energy policy fellow for the Centennial Institute, Colorado Christian University’s Denver-based think tank.
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