Enviornmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regulates Obedience to It's Demands

With the new regulations on the environment from the EPA that will soon change the way we live and work as the new restriction on electoral power generation will be reduced around the country, it remains to be seen if the people will find this a good idea when their IPad and IPhone go dark after 8 pm due to the lack of electric power.

Oh but don't fret on this as those in Washington will have all the electrical power they need as we all have to understand, they are the ones that have to make the hard decisions that will be in all of our bests interests, so their need will be greater then ours. That makes good sense, right?

Doesn't this new edict from EPA and the progressive socialists give you a warm and fussy feeling that there are others looking out for you and your family? All that's required of you is do as you are told.

Regulating Our Way to Prosperity
Source: Roger Meiners, "Regulating Our Way to Prosperity," Reason Magazine, March 18, 2014.

March 28, 2014

If federal agencies' calculations of regulatory benefits are correct, the United States should be seeing great economic growth, says Roger Meiners, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center.

Federal agencies must perform cost-benefit analyses on regulations estimated to cost more than $100 million in order to be sure that the costs of a regulation do not outweigh its benefits. Pursuant to this, our agencies have been churning out regulations that project tremendous growth. Our economy may be sluggish now, but with central planners projecting such positive economic impacts from their regulations, surely that growth must be on its way.

How are these benefits calculated? Largely, they come from what is known as the social cost of carbon (SCC). Based on estimates of future carbon emissions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an interagency working group determined what they believed to be the price of carbon. Using that figure, agencies can justify nearly any environmental regulation, and they claim benefits will come in the form of increased gross domestic product (GDP).

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Utility Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule was finalized in 2011 at an estimated cost of $10 billion annually. How did this pass the cost-benefit test?

• The EPA determined that the rule would create $37 billion to $90 billion in benefits for the economy (though it does not explain exactly how the benefits are monetized) in the form of higher GDP.
• If the EPA is right, MATS alone should add 0.5 percent of growth to the U.S. economy.
• The cost of MATS, however, is overwhelmed by these projected benefits (23,000 megawatts lost in electricity production, 200,000 jobs lost by 2015).
• Similarly, a new set of standards from the Department of Energy for residential furnace fans projects that the industry will lose 21 percent of its value. How is that justified? With energy savings billions of dollars in benefits.

Americans can sit back and relax -- our agencies are regulating our way to prosperity, and surely our economy will begin to turn around as these rules kick in and these projected benefits come to fruition, Meiners jokes.