EPA Fakes Regulatory Cost-Benefit Calculations

[Geee]

Heritage Foundation:

When pressed about the staggering increases in regulatory burden under his administration, President Obama says not to worry because the benefits exceed the costs. But a new and revealing set of charts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce highlights the shameless deception used to calculate the bulk of these purported benefits.

 

In Charting Federal Costs and Benefits, Chamber researchers analyzed the benefits calculations of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for the largest portion of the most costly regulations in recent years. What they found obliterates the president’s claims that sky-high regulatory costs are justified.

 

Specifically, the researchers reviewed the 45 rules for which the agency calculated benefits between 2000 and 2013. (The fact that the EPA failed to calculate benefits for any of the other 7,570 rules imposed by the agency in that period is another serious problem.) Although the regulations were crafted to address a variety of emissions, including carbon dioxide, lead, mercury and sulfur dioxide, a whopping 97 percent of the benefits actually were derived from the reduction of a single element—fine particulate matter—that was incidental to the pollutant targeted by the regulation.

[Geee]

The EPA Must Be Transparent About These Water Maps – And How They’re Being Used

 

The Environmental Protection Agency has developed detailed maps of waters located throughout the country. These waters include, according to the maps, ephemeral streams that flow only in response to precipitation events and intermittent streams that contain water for only part of the year. In light of the EPA’s proposed “waters of the U.S.” rule that defines what waters the agency and the Army Corps of Engineers can regulate under the Clean Water Act, these maps are disconcerting.

 

According to the EPA, these maps don’t show the waters that would be covered under the proposed rule but merely show water resources on both a national and state scale. Further, the EPA said the maps can give a false impression that most of a state is water because certain water features required discernible lines that were not to scale.

 

In July, the EPA appeared before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Committee investigators had discovered the existence of these maps and the EPA was confronted about them at the hearing. The EPA agreed to release the maps that had never been made public.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/05/epa-must-transparent-water-maps-theyre-used/

[clearvision]

Besides the world situation, the EPA is probably the biggest danger to the US economy there is.