EPA's destructive regulation of Texas industry

WASHINGTON - DECEMBER 07: EPA Administrator L...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Kathleen Hartnett White and Mario Loyola:

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Last July, EPA invalidated the 16-year old Texas Flexible Permitting Program. A strategic mechanism for achieving huge emissions reductions, the flexible permits impose tight emission caps for industrial facilities, while leaving plant operators some flexibility to innovate.

Now, purportedly because of concerns about specificity in the language of the permits, EPA has thrown the operating authority of more than 120 of the largest facilities in Texas into legal limbo.

EPA has yet to explain how the state permitting rules should be changed to satisfy these newfound concerns, but it has now imperiously decreed the Texas rules fall short of federal requirements. The affected facilities are in full compliance with state-issued permits, but EPA views them in violation of the Clean Air Act and subject to enforcement.

As an alternative to full-blooded EPA enforcement or revocation of their permits, EPA has offered a "voluntary" audit to conclude with an enforcement decree -- a coercive fist hidden inside a velvet glove. EPA has apparently invented a new method of rulemaking through the threat of enforcement -- entirely outside the constraints of the Administrative Procedures Act.

Texas is now challenging EPA's invalidation of the Texas Flexible Permitting Program in federal court. EPA's action jeopardizes the planned construction of a new $6.5 billion Motiva refinery in Port Arthur and Total's planned $3 billion refinery expansion. Thousands of new highly skilled and well-paying jobs are at risk. And it's not just Texas that suffers.

EPA's heavy-handed response to a dispute over permit rules strikes at the heart of the state's industrial base, one of the vital engines of the U.S. economy. Texas produces more than 25 percent of the country's transport fuel and more than 60 percent of its industrial chemicals. The state has become the country's leading job creator.

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The state is fighting back in the courts, but the disruption will have an effect on job creation as the article suggest. Hopefully the new House oversight will give the EPA approach a good scrubbing in 2011, but the answer to the mess being made right now may have to wait until the 2012 election when sanity can be restored and the pollution of liberalism removed from EPA control.
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