The Resistance: Openly Mocking

Yes, he can do this only because he's safely retired.  But he's speaking for many still on the job.

 

Think Progress: 

Mike Cox retired after three decades at the Environmental Protection Agency on March 31 with a scathing letter for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Team Trump is apparently an open joke to their staff — something even the Reagan and Bush administrations never experienced. Morale has collapsed, Cox notes.

“I have worked under six administrations with political appointees leading EPA from both parties,” Cox wrote on his last day on the job. “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an administration and by extension you.”

The 60-year-old Cox, who worked on climate change for EPA’s Region 10, which covers Alaska and the northwest, was especially harsh on Pruitt’s science denial.

Cox called Pruitt’s claim on national TV that CO2 is not a primary contributor to recent global warming “shocking” — and directly compared it to the congressional hearing with the CEOs of the major tobacco companies where “all of the CEOs categorically denied that smoking causes lung cancer.”

What’s the result of this denial? “You will continue to undermine your credibility and integrity with EPA staff, and the majority of the public,” Cox wrote, “if you continue to question this basic science of climate change.”

In the five-page letter, Cox slams the president for the “false and misleading” claim that killing EPA carbon pollution standards will bring back coal jobs.

Beshear Whines Like a Little Bitch About Weak-Ass New Coal Rules

If every ounce of coal vanished tomorrow, life in Kentucky would go on without a hiccup. Steve Beshear, Jack Conway, Matt Bevin, Mitch McConnell and every other Big-Coal-cock-gobbling politician in the state knows it.

Gov. Beshear’s Statement on EPA Rule Announced Today

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Aug. 3, 2015) – “I am extremely disappointed and frustrated by the huge changes the EPA made from the proposed rule. What is being proposed for Kentucky is disastrous – disastrous for our declining coal economy and equally disastrous for our very important manufacturing economy. The EPA claimed that it listened to the comments received on the proposed rule for the Clean Power Plan. It is clear from the emissions numbers the EPA has set for Kentucky that the agency did not listen to us. This rule leaves the Commonwealth with few, if any, alternatives to formulate a plan without significant harmful impact to rate payers, manufacturing companies and the overall economy.

Attorney General Jack Conway and I will continue to fight this onerous rule in the courts. During my entire term as Governor, I have remained steadfast in my support of Kentucky’s important coal and manufacturing industries, and the affordable energy and good jobs they provide the Commonwealth and the nation.

This is an extensive rule, and we will be meeting with stakeholders to assess its potential impacts. We will, however, continue to explore ways for Kentucky to comply with the rule should it become law, because we believe that a Kentucky specific plan would be better than a federal plan imposed on us.” – Gov. Steve Beshear.

Lies, motherfucking lies, and motherfucking liars lying about fucking their mothers.

Meanwhile in Reality World, here's Kevin Drum:

But Michael Grunwald isn't buying the hype. He's not impressed with Obama's plan to reduce power plant emissions 32 percent by 2030:

That’s nice, but by the end of this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the power sector’s emissions will already be down 15.4 percent from 2005 levels — about half the anticipated reductions in just a decade, and before the plan goes into effect. In other words, even under the strengthened plan, the rate of decarbonization is expected to slow over the next 15 years. What, did you think the strongest action ever taken to combat climate change would actually accelerate the nation’s efforts to combat climate change?

....If you’re really ranking them, the Clean Power Plan is at best the fourth-strongest action that Obama has taken to combat climate change, behind his much-maligned 2009 stimulus package, which poured $90 billion into clean energy and jump-started a green revolution; his dramatic increases in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, which should reduce our oil consumption by 2 million barrels per day; and his crackdown on mercury and other air pollutants, which has helped inspire utilities to retire 200 coal-fired power plants in just five years.

Kevin thinks that's a little unfair, but generally agrees on the main point.

In the meantime, Grunwald is right to say that the new mandates aren't really all that tough. At the same time, the fact that we have any power plant mandates at all really is a big deal. Just setting the precedent that the federal government should regulate carbon emissions from power plants is a critical first step, and if it survives court challenges and congressional temper tantrums it will likely lead to further cutbacks in the future. And that's a big deal.

No. Outlawing all fossil fuel use starting yesterday would be a big deal. Anything short of that is sucking Big Oil cock while the oceans rise.

KY Already Meeting Coal Rules McConnell Claims Will Kills Us All

Both Bevin and Conway are also whiny-ass titty baby liars about this, by the way.  And the fact that Big Coal apologist Len Peters is actually admitting it tells you the new EPA rules are really far weaker than they could have been.

Kevin Drum:

Whenever a new environmental regulation gets proposed, there's one thing you can count on: the affected industry will start cranking out research showing that the cost of compliance is so astronomical that it will put them out of business. It happens every time. Then, when the new regs take effect anyway, guess what? It turns out they aren't really all that expensive after all. The country gets cleaner and the economy keeps humming along normally. Hard to believe, no?

Apologies for the spoiler, but can you guess what's happening now that President Obama's new carbon rules for power plants are about to take effect? Mitch "War on Coal" McConnell has been issuing hysterical warnings about these regulations for years, but the Washington Post reports that—sorry, did you say something? You've already guessed, have you?

More striking is what has happened since: Kentucky’s government and electric utilities have quietly positioned themselves to comply with the rule — something state officials expect to do with relatively little effort....“We can meet it,” Kentucky Energy and Environment Secretary Leonard Peters, speaking at a climate conference, said of the EPA’s mandate.

Seriously, what was the last thing repugs sounded the alarm about that actually happened, or even posed a genuine threat in reality?

KY Fighting "Clean Power" Regs It Already Meets

How stupid is Kentucky about coal?  Not only hasn't Kentucky noticed that Big Coal died about 20 years ago and its rotting corpse has been stinking up the place ever since, but Kentucky is wasting time and tax dollars fighting EPA clean power regulations that the Commonwealth already meets because that's how dead coal is.

And this is the headline of the day:  "Kentucky May Accidentally Comply With EPA's Clean Power Plan"

From Inside Climate News:

Kentucky has consistently opposed federal efforts to impose environmental rules on the state's power plants.  First, lawmakers passed a bill to exempt the state from submitting a plan to meet the proposed air regulations that work against coal. Then it sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the rule.

Now, the state may go from defiance to compliance––without meaning to.

Cheap natural gas is flooding the market as environmental regulations take effect and because upgrading aging plants is cost-prohibitive, coal-fired power plants across Kentucky are shutting down, as they are across the country. In Kentucky alone, more than a quarter of the coal-fired plants have already shut down, or are expected to in the next two years.

Last year, the Obama administration released the draft version of the Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and sets emission targets for each state. Kentucky is supposed to reduce emissions 15 percent by 2020––and a total of 18 percent by 2030––from 2012 levels. It's also required to submit a plan showing how it will reach those goals.

With the announced retirements alone, Kentucky will reach the EPA's goal, energy analysts and state officials believe.

"Kentucky could be well in compliance with the targets" provided the state replaced the coal power with clean energy sources, said Amlan Saha, a vice president at M.J. Bradley and Associates, an environmental consulting group. "That’s not the case with many other states."

Coal is a vital part of Kentucky's culture. Despite flagging production numbers and new lows in coal jobs, the attachment to coal runs deep, and the industry continues to maintain a hold over the state’s politics.

Much more at the link.

Natural gas, of course, is not only not remotely close to "clean," but considering the effect of leaked methane on exacerbating global warming, fracked natural gas may be even worse than coal.

Shame on EPA for counting natural gas as "clean" energy.  If EPA counted only genuinely renewable energy as clean, Kentucky would be further from meeting clean power standards than it ever has been.

Shame on You, EPA

People have already died from coal ash in Kentucky and Tennessee, you chicken-shit, scare-of-Mitch-McConnell motherfuckers.

And no, he's not going to leave you alone because of this; he's recognized your cowardice and he's going to triple down on destroying your agency.

And you deserve it.

Emily Atkin at Think Progress:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday issued its first-ever regulations on coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal for power. But to environmentalists’ chagrin, the agency declined to designate the substance as a hazardous waste.

Instead, coal ash will be regulated similarly to household garbage. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy assured reporters on Friday that designating coal ash as solid waste, rather than hazardous waste, would be sufficient to prevent catastrophic spills of coal ash from the ponds the substance is often stored in, and to prevent it from leaching into groundwater, as it has in the past.

“I’m very proud that the EPA is moving this over the finish line,” McCarthy said. “[The rule] is a common sense path forward that protects public health and the environment.”

Coal ash — which often contains chemicals like arsenic, chromium, mercury, and lead — is the second-largest form of waste generated in the United States. After producing it, coal companies sometimes dispose of it by dumping it into ditches, and filling those ditches with water. Those ditches, called coal ash ponds or lagoons, are often unlined, meaning the coal ash comes in direct contact with the environment. It has, until now, never been federally regulated.

Environmentalists have long been pushing for a strong rule, but they were less than enthused about the direction EPA decided to take with it on Friday. “There is simply no excuse for EPA’s dangerously weak coal ash rule, which treats toxic waste loaded with carcinogens like household garbage,” Josh Nelson, campaign manager at CREDO Action, said in a statement.

 James Bruggers at the Courier has a good piece on this.

McConnell on the Wrong Side of Coal War

Courier-Journal headline: "McConnell vows war with Obama over coal."

The only war on coal is the one Mitch McConnell is fighting on behalf of the mine owners who are murdering coal miners and their communities.

Down with Tyranny:

Yesterday NPR and Mine Safety and Health News released the results of an investigation into another class of coddled criminals who thumb their nose at lawful society and get away with it: the mine operators.

While McConnell was shedding crocodile tears for the suffering the mine workers will have to endure because of Obama's Climate Change agreement with China, NPR was broadcasting how McConnell's donors may have been sending him his bribe money while refusing to pay millions of dollars in fines. Citations and the fines that go with egregious violations of safety rules are key components of the federal law designed to protect miners, reported NPR. "They are supposed to make violations expensive-- costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most serious offenses-- and create an incentive for mine owners to keep workers safe."

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Ken Ward has an excellent piece on the media’s complicity in the War on Coal narrative to describe the decline of coal jobs in Appalachia. In short, blame it on Obama and the hippies. This is of course absurd because the real reasons for coal’s decline in the region and the disappearing of the jobs is depletion of the resource, automation, the turn to natural gas and other cleaner forms of energy, and investment in the Powder River basin of Wyoming and other new coal fields. Instead of explaining this though, far too much of the media just repeat industry talking points that obscure the actual reasons in favor of cheap politics that cover up industry’s fault in the disappearance of jobs. 

Kentucky's Top Polluters

James Bruggers at the Courier:

Power plants top Kentucky's biggest sources of climate pollution, according to just-released data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

There's no surprise there.

But a prominent chemical plant in Louisville's Rubbertown area -- Dupont Louisville Works -- is among the top ten biggest climate polluters in Kentucky for its emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, which the EPA say are actually more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to heating up the atmosphere.

The EPA released its fourth year of Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data, detailing greenhouse gas pollution trends and emissions broken down by industrial sector, geographic region and individual facilities. In 2013, reported emissions from large industrial facilities nationwide were 20 million metric tons higher than the prior year, or 0.6 percent, driven largely by an increase in coal use for power generation, the agency said.

That figure intrigued me because conventional wisdom is that we've been burning more natural gas (which has less impact on the climate) and less coal.

Bashing EPA Ain't Gonna Get You Elected Governor, Jack

Unless you start standing up for real Democratic values, you're going to lose by double digits, just like Alison, and for the very same reason.

From the Courier:

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway and a dozen of his peers from across the country are pushing hard against a recently proposed carbon pollution rule, saying it would require states to undertake a massive overhaul of their energy sectors but give them far too little time to do so.

In recent filings led by the attorney general of West Virginia, Conway said that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority when creating the rule. Beyond that, he and other attorneys general said the proposal demands that states rush to complete their work.

The proposed “clean power” rule is a centerpiece of a major push by the Obama administration to help the United States – and the planet – attack climate change by reducing the amount of carbon pollution pumped into the air.

Remember This Dumb-Ass Remark When Stumbo Runs for Governor Next Year

That stench rolling off Kentucky House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Rotting Corpse of Coal, is not going to make him more attractive to donors, volunteers or voters next year.

Jack Brammer at the Herald:

Kentucky House Speaker Greg Stumbo called President Barack Obama's plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants "a dumb-ass policy" Wednesday, highlighting the political difficulties the plan has created for Kentucky Democrats.

His comments to reporters came as Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes launched a radio ad criticizing the Democratic president's plan as "pie-in-the-sky regulations that are impossible to achieve." Meanwhile, an issues advocacy group run by a former aide to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell began airing a television ad that says Grimes "talks tough now" even though she previously endorsed Obama's re-election bid.

Stumbo, a Democrat from the coalfields of Floyd County, said the U.S. Congress, not the Obama administration, should make major decisions on energy policy.

Uh, Greg?  That's exactly what Congress did when it ordered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.  That's what President Obama is doing: announcing the regulations that EPA is proposing on the direct orders of Congress.

The decomp is rotting your brain, boy.

"Every time America has set clear rules and better standards for our air, our water, and our children’s health – the warnings of the cynics have been wrong."

Fuck you, Big Coal.  Good job, Mr. President.



Full transcript here.

Kentucky Mandates Coal Dust Sprinkled on All School Lunches

Don't laugh - what the House Environmental Destruction and Corporate Resources Committee just approved pretty much amounts to the same thing.

John Cheves at the Herald:

Kentucky would create coal-friendly power plant emission standards in an attempt to head off tougher federal rules under a bill passed unanimously Thursday by a House committee.

By June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose strict limits on the amounts of carbon dioxide that existing coal-fired power plants can produce.Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA treats carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere — as a pollutant contributing to climate change. The EPA proposed limits for newly built power plants in September that would cut carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half, giving an advantage to natural gas, which burns cleaner.

State lawmakers say the expected EPA limits could force the retirement of coal-fired plants producing most of Kentucky's electricity, driving up power costs and hurting the economy. They're trying to get ahead of the EPA with House Bill 388, sponsored by Rep. Jim Gooch, D-Providence, who co-owns a manufacturer of coal-mining equipment whose clients include industry giants Alliance Resource Partners and Peabody Energy.

HB 388 would instruct the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet to create a plan for existing power plants that considers the economic impact of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, such as higher electric bills and lost jobs; that sets "reasonable" and "flexible" standards for plants; and that doesn't require switching from coal to other fuels, such as natural gas, or the use of nascent technologies, such as carbon capture and storage.

The House Committee on Natural Resources and the Environment, of which Gooch is chairman, passed the bill Thursday, sending it to the full House. Nobody spoke in opposition.

This bill uses deliberately deceptively inocuous language to specifically exempt coal generating plants from doing jack shit to reduce the deadly gasses they emit by the ton every hour of every day.

This bill specifically condemns Kentuckians to slow deaths from lung cancer, mercury poisoning and dozens of other maladies stemming from the mining, processing and burning of coal.

This bill is a big fat Fuck You to parent, every teacher, every member of the reality-based community struggling to help Kentucky crawl out from under the stinking, rotting corpse of Big Coal.

Nobody spoke in opposition.

Not just no members of the committee, may they all suffer from painful, disfiguring, humiliating and incurable skin diseases for the rest of their miserable, inexcusable lives.

No members of the public. No professional staff from Kentucky's regulatory agencies, who absolutely know better. No representatives of environmental groups who, granted, are stretched dangerously thin to try to cover every lethally destructive bill the Kentucky General Assembly comes up with every year.

Nobody.

Kentucky Still Hooked on That Sweet, Deadly Coal

This decision will actually kill real, live Kentuckians who have to drink selenium-poisoned water.  Will it even get mentioned at the Eastern Kentucky "summit" being promoted by Governor Beshear and Rep. Hal Rogers?

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

This is not an acceptable decision from the EPA during a Democratic administration:

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection to change how toxic selenium pollution from mountaintop removal mines is measured for the purposes of determining compliance with the Clean Water Act. Selenium, which causes significant biological damage to fish native to the waters of Appalachia, is a toxic pollutant discharged from valley fills into rivers and streams below mountaintop removal sites. The EPA-backed changes to how Kentucky measures selenium pollution allow the state to rely on an impractical and complicated test of tissue samples from fish rather than the current practice of directly sampling the water discharged below mountaintop removal mines and other selenium sources. EPA’s capitulation gives a free pass to industry and will allow unacceptably high levels of selenium pollution to continue flow into Kentucky’s waterways.

If anything, Obama’s EPA should be cracking down on coal mining and making it harder for the mountaintop removal industry to destroy the mountains and ecology of Appalachia. There is no good reason not to directly sample the water. None. Except that the coal industry doesn’t like it. Because ultimately this isn’t about the poisoning of fish. It’s about the poisoning of people. If the fish are poisoned, the people probably are at higher risk as well. Of course, one expects nothing else from the coal industry; it’s spent the last 125 years treating the people of Appalachia like feudal serfs. But for the Obama EPA to actually weaken testing rules, that I don’t get.

Here’s some background on why this all matters:

Current selenium limits in states like West Virginia have helped the Sierra Club and other nonprofits force coal companies to hand over millions of dollars in fines and cleanup costs, but those standards are based on older EPA water criteria and guidance that hasn’t been revised in nearly a decade. New data has suggested less stringent requirements would be adequate and the EPA has said it is updating the acute and chronic freshwater ambient water quality standards for selenium, though the agency has yet to act.

Kentucky is now trying to move ahead while the agency drags its feet, having developed its own criteria with help from the EPA and submitted it for federal approval. The proposal would require that high selenium levels be present in fish tissue before triggering a violation, and it would likely be emulated by neighboring states if it gets the green light from the EPA.

In taking the initiative, Kentucky is hoping to put more regulatory control in its own hands on an issue that has been litigated frequently in other states like West Virginia, according to Crowell & Moring LLP partner Kirsten L. Nathanson.
“The environmental groups have been driving enforcement through lawsuits,” Nathanson said. “Kentucky is trying to find an instructive solution to these issues and avoid some of these ad-hoc enforcement actions by taking affirmative control of its regulatory program for selenium.”

Industry has always preferred state-led regulatory programs because the states are far easier for industry to control than the feds. Politicians come cheaper and they tend to be much friendlier to local industry.

A very disappointing decision.

 And it is all on the head of Affordable Care Act  hero Steve "Coal Dust is Delicious and Nutritious" Beshear.

Alison May Be Stupider than AynRandy

Zandar nailed this one:

I'm not sure what Alison Lundergan Grimes is thinking in her lates line of attack against Mitch the Turtle, but not even I buy her argument that Obama administration EPA regulations are somehow McConnell's fault.

SNIP  

This is a nonsense attack coming from McConnell's right when his primary challenger Matt Bevin blames the guy for coal regs, but for Grimes to make the argument is not only disingenuous, it's stupid.  Running away from President Obama isn't going to make Democrats in the state vote for her.

SNIP

Grimes better figure out a smarter position on coal regs in Kentucky than "They're Mitch's fault."  It's insultingly stupid to the people who would want to vote for her.

Could not have said it better myself.

Big Coal WATB Already Bitching About Future Regs

Seriously, morons: if you're still planning to build new coal plants you are too disconnected from reality to be making any decision more consequential than what to have for breakfast.

John Cheves at the Herald:

Nobody is likely to build more coal-burning power plants in the United States under strict emission limits proposed Friday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Kentucky coal and utility officials predicted.

That could further weaken demand for the coal of Eastern Kentucky, which has seen mines close and thousands of mining jobs disappear over the last few years. Coal counties in the mountains suffered official unemployment rates this summer between 11 and 18 percent.

Coal country unemployment is caused by falling demand, the difficulty and expense of reaching remaining seams, and the lack of non-mine employment in towns wholly owned and operated by Big Coal.

President Obama's long-overdue proposed rules have nothing to do with unemployment and everything to do with reducing the frequency of climate-change catastrophes like last week's drowning of central Colorado.

The Obama administration (pressed) ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It's also a key step in President Barack Obama's global warming plans, because it would help end what he called "the limitless dumping of carbon pollution" from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won't immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to propose those regulations.

"For power producers and coal mining companies that reject these standards, they have no reason to complain, and every excuse to innovate," said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., the author of a 2009 bill to limit global warming. The legislation, backed by the White House, passed the House, but died in the Senate.

 Coal is dead. Has been for years. But the industry and Big Power refuse to bury it, so the stinking corpse continues to poison the planet with lethal carbon and the political system with stupidity and lies.

EPA OKs Monsanto Poisoning All Your Food

From Firedoglake:

“The EPA, whose mission is . . . ‘to protect human health and the environment,’ has approved Monsanto’s request to allow levels of glyphosate (Roundup) contamination in your food up to a million times higher than have been found carcinogenic.”

EPA Regs Cost Too Much Only If You Think Human Lives Are Worthless

Particularly when the people paying to obey anti-pollution regulations are rich white corporate stockholders and the people whose lives are saved are poor non-white workers, polluters think it's obvious that EPA regs "cost too much."

But the racist, corporatist, anti-worker assumptions implicit in that argument (which, by the way, polluters and their apologists have been making for almost 40 years) have never been quite so exposed to the harsh light of hard data as they are now.

Jeff Spross at Think Progress:

From the 2012 Presidential campaign onwards, Republicans have railed against the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “job-killing,” as a threat to freedom, and as a drag on economic growth. The claim has never comported with evidence, but like a zombie it just refuses to die.

The latest effort to kill it comes via a new study from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which found that the benefits EPA regulations bring to the economy far outweigh the costs.

The way this works is pretty straight-forward. Environmental regulations do impose compliance costs on businesses, and can raise prices, which hurt economic growth. But they also create jobs by requiring pollution clean-up and prevention efforts. And perhaps even more importantly, they save the economy billions by avoiding pollution’s deleterious health effects.

SNIP

The OMB study looked at a range of regulations across the economy, and found their benefits outweighed their costs across the board. The blue and red bars below represent the range of estimates for what the respective costs and benefits of regulations were. In very few instances was even the very upper limit of cost estimates equal to the very lower limit of benefit estimates.

Source: Office of Management and Budget

But no where was the effect greater than with EPA regulations themselves. Over the last decade, they imposed as much as $45 billion in costs on the economy, but they also drove as much as $640 billion in benefits:

The OMB found that a decade’s worth of major federal rules had produced annual benefits to the U.S. economy of between $193 billion and $800 billion and impose aggregate costs of $57 billion to $84 billion. “These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect the uncertain benefits and costs of each rule,” the report noted.

Rules from the EPA added significantly to both sides of the ledger. “It should be clear that the rules with the highest benefits and the highest costs, by far, come from the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular its Office of Air and Radiation,” the OMB study said. EPA regulations accounted for between 58% and 80% of the benefits the study found as well as 44% to 54% of the costs. Air regulations accounted for nearly 99% of EPA rule benefits, according to the report.

SNIP

Since this is a study by the executive branch that endorses policies preferred by the executive branch, it’s worth pointing out that similar findings have been regularly dug up by other researchers. In 2011, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that job loss due to increased energy prices from MATS would be swamped by new jobs in pollution abatement and control. It also found that for each major EPA rule finalized by the Obama Administration at the time, annual benefits exceeded costs by $10 to $95 billion a piece. EPI even returned to the question in 2012, and found net job gains from MATS would reach 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015. The San Francisco Federal Reserve even ran an analysis of regulations more broadly, and found that in states where businesses expressed more concern about regulations over time, employment actually went up slightly.

Surveys of small businesses routinely fail to find compelling evidence that firms view taxes and regulations as a major impediment to hiring, an EPA-mandated clean-up of the Chesapeake BAY is anticipated to create 35 times as many jobs as the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and jobs in the coal industry actually increased by 10 percent after the EPA cracked down on mountaintop-removal mining in 2009.

We can add "regulations kills business and strangle the economy" to the list of lies corporations and repugs tell.

If Big Coal Hates Her, She Might Be OK

No, I'm not talking about Ashley Judd, although the same rule applies.

From the Washington Monthly:

Gina McCarthy, currently assistant EPA administrator for Air and Radiation, nominated to lead EPA. Coal interests really don’t like her, but other businesses seem reasonably supportive.

That "other businesses seem reasonably supportive" is a bad sign, but at least she's not a Wall Street shill or a filthy billionaire, like most of Obama's nominees.

Obama Re-Election Instantly Creates More Than a Thousand Jobs in Kentucky

Wow. Look at that.

Southern Coal Corp. is recalling several hundred laid-off miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia and plans to hire 650 new workers.  Roanoke-based Southern Coal announced Tuesday that it has entered into a multi-year contract to supply coal to American Electric Power.  The contract will allow it to re-start mines idled earlier this year and to save 500 jobs.

It has to be the election, right? I mean, surely all those coal execs claiming that President Obama is responsible for what happens in the coal fields weren't lying, were they?

Nor the ones who claimed the EPA determined the number of coal-plant jobs, they couldn't have been lying, could they?

Adam Walser at WHAS-11: 

Hundreds of new jobs, cleaner air and competitive electric rates...that's what LG&E officials say new plant upgrades will bring to Kentuckiana.

The announcement came Thursday at a groundbreaking ceremony at the Mill Creek power plant on lower Dixie Highway.

The new jobs will begin almost immediately.

SNIP

Over the next three and a half years, the company will spent $940 million upgrading the four coal fire power plants that currently supply electricity to serve nearly a million people who reside in Metro Louisville.  

The expansion will allow the plants to all continue to use coal, while complying with new EPA regulations.

SNIP

Construction contractors expect to hire about 700 construction workers over the course of the project, who will earn from $22 to $25 an hour.

No, Big Coal and Big Power never lie, especially about jobs in their industries and how President Obama is responsible for them.

Yep, I'd say Big Coal, Big Power, the Commonwealth of Kentucky and all its workers and voters owe a great big debt of gratitude to the president who has created more jobs for them than any other: Barack Hussein Obama.

Big Chemical Still Proving Rachel Carson Right

Back in the '70s, there was a great commercial about butter-tasting margarine with the tag line "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature," followed by a clap of thunder and lightning.

 

It became iconic in part because the newly-created EPA was riding high, attacking toxics-producing corporations left, right and center. Being an environmentalist was cool, and "it's not nice to fool Mother Nature" was a cool way to express the simultaneously protective and threatening ethos.

 

In our house, "Mother Nature" was also a symbol of the mother of the anti-toxics movement: Rachel Carson.

 

From Carson biographer William Souter:

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s landmark warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides, turns 50 this month. By extension, that puts the environmental movement also at the half-century mark—along with the bitter, divisive argument we continue to have over both the book and the movement it spawned. The terms of that argument, which emerged in the brutal reaction to Silent Spring from those who saw it not as a warning but as a threat, haven’t changed much. And they leave us with a vexing question: Why do we fight? How is it that the environment we all share is the subject of partisan debate? After all, the right and the left inhabit the same planet, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

Carson’s book was controversial before it even was a book. In June 1962, three long excerpts were published by The New Yorker magazine. They alarmed the public, which deluged the Department of Agriculture and other agencies with demands for action, and outraged the chemical industry and its allies in government. In late August 1962, after he was asked about pesticides at a press conference, President Kennedy ordered his science adviser to form a commission to investigate the problems brought to light, the president said, by “Miss Carson’s book.” A month later, when Silent Spring was published, the outlines of the fight over pesticides had hardened. Armed with a substantial war chest—Carson’s publisher heard it was $250,000—pesticide makers launched an attack aimed at discrediting Silent Spring and destroying its author.

How successful have the anti-Carson, pro-death-by-toxic-chemical forces been? They are literally creating super bugs that can destroy American agriculture and our ability to feed ourselves.

  

Aviva Shen at Think Progress:

Agricultural giant Monsanto Company has risen to the top of the corporate food chain largely thanks to its seeds. These are no ordinary seeds — they have been genetically modified (GM) to withstand and even produce herbicides and pesticides. Monsanto’s GM corn and soybean seeds have become so widespread over the past two decades that now, a new crop of “superweeds” have evolved to resist these potent chemicals. Farmers then have little choice but to buy Monsanto’s beefed up seeds in an arms race with nature.

Now, the EPA is launching a review of one of Monsanto’s corn strains engineered to produce the natural pesticide Bt. As the agency told Bloomberg, “There is mounting evidence raising concerns that insect resistance is developing in parts of the corn belt,” where Monsanto’s corn dominates the fields. Root worms exposed to the corn’s toxin seem to have become immune to it, breeding an unprecedented colony of superworms that are bound to spread throughout the entire Midwest.

Meanwhile, Monsanto recently released a new sweet corn variety containing the Bt pesticide. And for the first time, Monsanto will market this corn as fresh produce, rather than an ingredient for processed foods. Although Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and General Mills have refused to carry the corn, Walmart will start stocking the GM sweet corn in the coming months, without any label to let consumers know what they are buying.

And Monsanto hopes to keep consumers in the dark. The company recently spent $4.2 million trying to kill a November ballot initiative in California that would require labeling on food products containing genetically modified ingredients. Proposition 37 would bring the state in line with Japan, China, the European Union, and Australia, which already require labels on genetically modified foods. 91 percent of Americans support GMO labeling.

Opponents of Proposition 37 claim GMOs are harmless and would unfairly bias people toward the organic food industry. Though there has been no conclusive evidence that eating GMOs leads to health problems, the FDA does not require safety studies before approving them and Monsanto has lobbied the USDA to reject any and all outside studies when considering applications for new strains. Leaving health aside, the onslaught of superweeds and superworms alone should afford Californians the chance to decide what types of food they want to support.

The EPA has spent the last 20 years ostentatiously not stopping Monsanto from finding ever-new ways to eliminate the ability of human beings to grow food on earth.  They're not about to change direction now.

Grow your own food. Anybody can grow a tomato plant in a pot in a sunny window. Buy food you can't grow from local farmers you trust. Ask the manager of your chain grocery why the food is not labeled GMO and ask for labeled products. Ask your congress critter why she doesn't want you to know which toxic food to avoid feeding to your children.

Besehar So Happy We Are All Going to Die From Poisoned Water

A: Clean water regs never killed a single coal mining job and overturning them won't add a single coal mining job.

B: New clean water regs would probably save lives; the lack of them for the past several decades has certainly claimed lives.

C: No, people who work in coal country can NOT afford to buy bottled water to drink, cook and wash with.

D: Mining-poisoned water does not recognize county, state or even national borders. If there's a poisoned water source on this continent, you're imbibing it somehow. So it behooves you to work to minimize them everywhere.

E. Kentucky Governor Steve Cowardly Waste of Oxygen Beshear is a piece of shit. 

James Bruggers at the Courier: 

A federal judge has thrown out one of the key provisions of the Obama administration’s crackdown on pollution from coal mining in Appalachia, saying the EPA went too far in trying to impose tough new water-quality guidelines for states such as Kentucky.

SNIP

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and the Kentucky Coal Association had joined the lawsuit by the National Mining Association and other plaintiffs, arguing that the EPA’s guidance had in essence established formal standards that mining companies had difficulty meeting. 

The mining association’s president, Bill Bissett, declared victory, saying the judge’s ruling could begin to ease a mining permit logjam that he said has tied up “at least 46 Eastern Kentucky mining operations.” 

Beshear likewise praised the ruling. 

“Today’s action by the federal court is a victory for coal miners who have seen mines close and their jobs put in jeopardy due, in part, to the actions of the federal EPA,” he said in a written statement. 

But environmentalists lamented the court’s ruling. 

“It’s a big deal, and it is bad news,” said Judy Petersen, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a group that advocates for clean water. “Unfortunately the decision seems to follow the pattern we’ve seen lately that appears to place further limits on the EPA’s ability to protect the public interest and public health.”

SNIP

[The mining association’s president, Bill] Bissett said the issue could also be resolved during the presidential election, which could bring a change of administrations in Washington. 

Water-poisoning, mountain-destroying, job-killing coal mine owners for Romney!