Obama’s EPA Ignores Small Biz Concerns that Its Coal Regulations Will Kill Jobs

Obama’s EPA Ignores Small Biz Concerns that Its Coal Regulations Will Kill Jobs

(Via Pajamas media) Earlier today, President Obama gave yet another airy speech about the greatness of America, how we’re innovative, and how loves to see things with the stamp “Made In America” on them. I ranted about that speech as he delivered it, here. As he said that stuff about “Made In America,” his own administration is standing pat in the way of Americans making airliners, and Boeing is losing orders to its non-American competitors. Obama never bothered to address that glaring gap between what he says and what he does.

This president is all talk, and he means none of what he says. While he speaks loftily about bringing American jobs back, his own bureaucracies are unleashed in the service of killing American jobs. That’s not an opinion, it’s simply fact. And when American businesses point out that Obama’s bureaucracies are killing jobs, he ignores them.

President Barack Obama is ignoring heated concerns from within his own administration that new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on the coal industry will be economically devastating.

The EPA is plowing forward with new Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) mandates on the coal industry. The new regulations would force coal energy plants to install new giant scrubber-like materials in their smokestacks to capture carbon particles. Carbon captured in this way would then be made innocuous through a chemical process.

In a lengthy letter to EPA Director Lisa Jackson, Obama’s Small Business Administration advocacy office wrote the EPA “may have significantly understated” the economic “burden this rulemaking would impose on small entities.”

One Southern Indiana Chamber of Commerce vice president, Tonya Fischer, told The Daily Caller the entire state of Indiana would be “devastated” by these regulations. “We are definitely in opposition to [the MACT regulations] because it would be devastating for the state of Indiana.” She adds that local businesses, which are struggling with the tough economy already, would be forced to pick up the extra energy production costs Obama’s EPA is pushing. “We get 95 percent of our electricity from coal.”

“The cost to convert those facilities would be passed on to the small business owners, or basically shut them [the coal energy producing facilities] down altogether,” Fischer said. “It would become cost-prohibitive for them [local businesses] to continue paying their electricity bills.”

Not only is the regulatory arm of the Obama regime ignoring small business concerns, it may be lying about how the regulations in question were formulated in the first place.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski believes the EPA and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) falsely implied they had worked together on an analysis of how the MACT regulations and others would affect the nation’s power supply.

“EPA’s rulemakings could have a serious impact on the affordability and reliability of our nation’s energy supply, especially given the sheer number of new regulations the agency has rolled out in such a short time period,” Murkowski wrote in a statement. ”The [FERC] commission’s staff has preliminarily estimated that up to 81 gigawatts of existing generation are ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to be retired as a consequence of new EPA rules. That’s nearly 8 percent of our installed capacity for electric generation and a retirement at that scale could have drastic consequences for many parts of our country.”
Tom Borelli, the director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, said the EPA’s issues with the FERC and the SBA are “huge.”

“After the tragedies of 9/11, we learned that the securities administrations and agencies didn’t communicate,” Borelli said. “Now, we have the EPA and the FERC and the SBA not communicating. Obviously, it’s the EPA run wild, they’re a job killing machine and they don’t care about the consequences of their actions.”

Joe Wilson, vindicated again. I’m not sure this president is capable of saying anything that’s true anymore, if he ever was. But back on the jobs front, there is only one remedy available that is sure to bring the economy back: Defeat Obama next year and de-fang his agencies. Fire them all.
And that’s because Barack Obama doesn’t care about jobs or the economy. He has consistently put his ideology ahead of all other considerations. He doesn’t care that the average American is struggling. He doesn’t care that his policies are killing their jobs. Barack Obama does not care about anything other than his own political views and goals, at all.

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/08/11/obamas-epa-ignores-small-biz-concerns-that-its-coal-regulations-will-kill-jobs/