Showdown at the EPA corral

By Steve Milloy, The Washington Times:

March 2 should be a date that lives in infamy for the Obama Environmental Protection Agency.

That day will most likely be the last opportunity for congressional Republicans to apply meaningful pressure on EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson as she testifies before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the agency’s 2013 budget.

Over the past three years, the Obama EPA has conducted a scorched earth campaign against fossil fuel producers and users, especially the coal-fired power industry, with multibillion-dollar rules that provide no meaningful environmental or public-health benefits, like the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and the Mercury Air Toxics Standard (MATS).

The EPA will soon propose its greenhouse gas emission standards for power plants – rules that will attempt to make it financially impossible to construct new coal-fired power plants in the United States.

It seems that President Obama was deadly serious when he told the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008, “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

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