Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

Lisa Jackson

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Coal Regs A Laughing Matter to EPA

In testimony to a congressional subcommittee in October 2011, the American Coal Council noted that an increasing number of coal generators were shutting down their power plants because they couldn’t meet environmental objectives:

“Why are some folks gleeful about that?” asked ACC’s CEO Janet Gellici in her prepared testimony. “Where is the satisfaction in having our nation’s largest electric power providers shut their doors, stop producing low-cost electricity, fire their employees, and still not reach our environmental objectives?

“There can be only one conclusion — that the real objective is not to reduce emissions — that we are really not concerned with meeting environmental objectives. It would appear that other agendas are in play here, agendas to eliminate coal generation from our energy portfolio simply because it is based on coal.”

In mid-December 2012 — two weeks before Lisa Jackson announced her resignation under pressure — the EPA’s inspector general announced it is auditing the agency’s email records to “determine whether EPA follows applicable laws and regulations when using private and alias email accounts to conduct official business.”

Jackson left her job on Feb. 15.  Her deputy, Bob Perciasepe, is now acting EPA administrator.  Perciasepe served as a senior EPA official in the Clinton administration, and later he worked as chief operating officer at the National Audubon Society, one of the world’s leading environmental organizations.

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EPA Under Investigation

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General says it will investigate whether EPA officials — including Administrator Lisa Jackson — used alias email accounts to conduct official government business, thereby shielding those communications from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Jackson reportedly used the name “Richard Windsor” on an official email account from which she may have sent messages on the administration’s coal policy.

Chris Horner of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute says he discovered Jackson’s “false identity” while doing research for his book, “The Liberal War on Transparency.”

Horner said he came across an “obscure” EPA memo indicating that the alias email accounts were instituted by former EPA Administrator Carol Browner, who designed her own secret address for an account that was set to ‘auto-delete.'” (Browner, who served as EPA administrator in the Clinton administration, also served President Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy from 2009 to 2011.)

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Falling Over the “Regulatory Cliff”

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday issued its first major regulation since the Nov. 6 election, imposing new air quality rules on soot pollution in what critics called evidence of a post-election “regulatory cliff.”

The EPA rule reduces by 20 percent the maximum amount of soot released into the air from smokestacks, diesel trucks and other sources of pollution.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the new standard will save thousands of lives each year and reduce the burden of illness in communities across the country, as people “benefit from the simple fact of being able to breathe cleaner air.”

But the new soot standard has been highly anticipated by environmental and business groups, who have battled over whether it will protect public health or cause job losses.

The American Petroleum Institute warned Friday that the new rule “is unnecessary and could drive up costs for new and expanding businesses trying to hire employees.”

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