Growls

CNS News reported yesterday the U.S. “Energy Department says it has ‘mandate’ to force ‘market transformation’ for household appliances,” writing:

“Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the recently reestablished Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), (Cathy) Zoi pointed to four tactics the Obama administration intended use to advance the “deployment of clean energy.” The first three were government subsidies for private-sector green energy projects, special tax incentives for green energy projects and low-interest government-backed loans for green energy projects.

“The fourth one, which the secretary and I love,” said Zoi, “is where we have a mandate. Where we can actually just issue regulations and do market transformation. (emphasis added)

"Zoi was referring to authority the department has under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 as amended by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That law gives the DOE the power to set efficiency standards for energy-consuming products.”

Before joining the Obama administration, “Zoi served as environmental adviser to President Bill Clinton and the founding CEO of former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.” CNS also writes:

“Zoi said that stricter federal energy efficiency standards will “drive innovation” and are “cost effective.”

“As the secretary [Chu] says, ‘We’re going to make people save money for themselves,’” Zoi said. “They haven’t dumped the dollar bills on the ground yet.”

In the same vein of regulatory overkill in the name of green environmentalism, Rich Trzupek writes in FrontPage Magazine about “Washington’s green power trip,” writing about a speech delivered by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. He points out the following:

“Having set forth the case that everything the EPA does always turns a profit and that anyone who disagrees with that assessment should be dismissed as a dirty, rotten capitalist, Jackson proceeded to up the ante. Clearly stung by criticism of the incredibly onerous new set of regulations that her agency has proposed and promulgated in the last year and a half, the administrator proclaimed that these new rules would usher in a new era of green prosperity in America. The facts are quite different. Jackson has promulgated air quality standards that will make it impossible to build a new coal-fired power plant of any consequence in America, thus effectively writing off our largest pool of cheap domestic energy. Her EPA has circumvented the provisions of the Clean Air Act so it can force power plants to apply for permits to emit greenhouse gases and then demanded that the states join the feds in the circumvention. Jackson claims, over and over again, that the EPA is following the best scientific advice available, but the opposite is true. The academics that are creating new standards for industry – standards that Jackson clearly adores – offer the worst kind of scientific advice available: advice of the sort that only pie-in-the-sky academics with no real-world experience could produce. We’ve paid a hefty price for all of the environmental progress we’ve made, but that progress has at least represented a compromise forged among all interested parties. Under Lisa Jackson, the EPA will exact the kind of costs for further, unneeded progress that will make the prices we paid before pale by comparison, because she has effectively handed the keys of the Agency to the most radical of the environmentalist advocates.” (emphasies added)

For more on EPA’s power grab, Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity writes about the U.S. Senate efforts to “defund the EPA’s global warming efforts" in a Fox News column.

For more on America’s federal regulatory state, see the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 2010 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments (requires Adobe) by Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. Another source is Cato Institute’s journal, Regulation. As Crews points out, regulation is nothing more than a hidden tax.

UDATE (9/28/10): Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ($) reports:

"(T)he annual cost of federal regulations in the United States increased to more than $1.75 trillion in 2008, a 3% real increase over five years, to about 14% of U.S. national income. This cost is in addition to the federal tax burden of 21%, for a combined cost of 35% of national income. One out of every three dollars earned in the U.S. goes to pay for or comply with federal laws and regulations, and new policies enacted in 2010 for health care and financial services will increase this burden."