Environmental Policy – Watts Up With That?

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“A more conservative EPA … will prevent unnecessary expenditures by the regulated community [and] … deliver savings to the American taxpayer. Improved transparency will serve as an important check … [to] deliver tangible environmental improvements to the American people in the form of cleaner air, cleaner water, and healthier soils.” ( – Heritage Foundation, Project 2025)

Last week’s post examined the energy section of the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page Mandate for Leadership: 2025. This post reproduces the environmental section of the same document (1,200 words) calling for a return to the basics of clean air and water–and away from the cancer of climate policy as ecological.

As explained below, EPA needs to prioritize achievable, definable environmental improvement, not engage in wasteful, futile climatism and forced energy transformation.

The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being co-opted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states. Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.

Not surprisingly, the EPA under the Biden Administration has returned to the same top-down, coercive approach that defined the Obama Administration. There has been a reinstitution of unachievable standards designed to aid in the “transition” away from politically disfavored industries and technologies and toward the Biden Administration’s preferred alternatives. This approach is most obvious in the Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables….

As a consequence of this approach, we see the return of costly, job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy and grow the bureaucracy but do little to address, much less resolve, complex environmental problems. In some instances, these actions even work to undermine environmental efforts as they push industries overseas to countries whose enforcement of pollution-control requirements is seriously deficient—if indeed they have any meaningful requirements at all. Meanwhile, agency costs and staffing have increased significantly….

Compared to the Obama Administration, there is one key difference in the Biden Administration’s approach: In a concerted effort to diminish congressional oversight, the position of EPA Administrator has been overshadowed by the creation of multiple “Climate Czars” at the Biden White House. In effect, current EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who has a reputation as a well-meaning, generally capable former state official, has been left out of the political loop, serving mostly as a pleasant distraction from EPA’s expansive, costly, and economy-destroying agenda.

A Co-opted Mission. The EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy. Embedded activists have sought to evade legal restraints in pursuit of a global, climate-themed agenda, aiming to achieve that agenda by implementing costly policies that otherwise have failed to gain the requisite political traction in Congress. Many EPA actions in liberal Administrations have simply ignored the will of Congress, aligning instead with the goals and wants of politically connected activists.

Pursuit of this globally focused agenda has distracted the agency from fulfilling its core mission, thereby creating a backlog of missed statutory deadlines, and at times has even led to preventable environmental disasters. During the Obama Administration, for example, the U.S. experienced two of the worst environmental Environmental Protection Agency disasters in decades, including the Flint, Michigan, water crisis in 2014 and the Gold King Mine spill in 2015.

Beyond creating such immediate and tangible harm in various communities, an EPA led by activism and a disregard for the law has generated uncertainty in the regulated community, vendetta-driven enforcement, weighted analytics, increased costs, and diminished trust in final agency actions. Although the U.S. environmental story is very positive, there has been a return to fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change.

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs. In effect, the Biden EPA has once again presented a false choice to the American people: that they have to choose between a healthy environment and a strong, growing economy.

Policy Reform (“Back to Basics”)

EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government. This will require significant restructuring and streamlining of the agency to reflect the following:

• State Leadership. EPA should build earnest relationships with state and local officials and assume a more supportive role by sharing resources and expertise, recognizing that the primary role in making choices about the environment belongs to the people who live in it.
• Accountable Progress. Regulatory efforts should focus on addressing tangible environmental problems with practical, cost-beneficial, affordable solutions to clean up the air, water, and soil, and the results should be measured and tracked by simple metrics that are available to the public.
• Streamlined Process. Duplicative, wasteful, or superfluous programs that do not tangibly support the agency’s mission should be eliminated, and a structured management program should be designed to assist state and local governments in protecting public health and the environment.
• Healthy, Thriving Communities. EPA should consider and reduce as much as possible the economic costs of its actions on local communities to help them thrive and prosper.
• Compliance Before Enforcement. EPA should foster cooperative relationships with the regulated community, especially small businesses, that encourage compliance over enforcement.
• Transparent Science and Regulatory Analysis. EPA should make public and take comment on all scientific studies and analyses that support regulatory decision-making.

Climate Change

• Remove the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for any source category that is not currently being regulated. The overall reporting program imposes significant burdens on small businesses and companies that are not being regulated. This is either a pointless burden or a sword-of-Damocles threat of future regulation, neither of which is appropriate.
• Establish a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding.
• Establish a significant emissions rate (SER) for greenhouse gasses (GHGs).

Needed Reforms: Day One Priorities

• Notify Congress that EPA will not conduct any ongoing or planned science activity for which there is not clear and current congressional authorization. This priority should be underscored in the President’s first budget request.
• The new President’s Inauguration Day regulatory review/freeze directives should avoid exceptions for EPA actions. This freeze should explicitly include quasi-regulatory actions, including assessments, determinations, standards, and guidance, that have failed to go through the notice-and-comment process and may date back years.
• Pause for review all contracts above $100,000 with a heavy focus on major external peer reviews and regulatory models.
• Call for the public to identify areas where EPA has inconsistently assessed risk, failed to use the best science, or participated in research misconduct.
• Eliminate the use of unauthorized regulatory inputs like the social cost of carbon, black box and proprietary models, and unrealistic climate scenarios, including those based on Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5.

CONCLUSION
A more conservative EPA that aligns with the policies outlined in this chapter will lead to a better environmental future without unintended consequences. It will prevent unnecessary expenditures by the regulated community, allowing for investment in economic development and job creation, which are keys to thriving communities.

Cutting EPA’s size and scope will deliver savings to the American taxpayer. Improved transparency will serve as an important check to ensure that the agency’s mission is not distorted or coopted for political gain. Importantly, a conservative EPA will deliver tangible environmental improvements to the American people in the form of cleaner air, cleaner water, and healthier soils.

Critical Comment

There is much to like in the above reform, but the political document goes easy on cutting the roots of a poisoned tree. Specifically, the new President should end the climate mission from the EPA in its entirety; withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord; and cease funding of and participation in the International Energy Agency. The infamous endangerment finding needs to be revisited and reversed, and the platform’s call to “establish a significant emissions rate (SER) for greenhouse gasses (GHGs)” should be removed.