Proposal to Limit EPA Emissions Rules Will Save Jobs, Incomes
Washington, D.C. - A proposal to keep the EPA from usurping the authority of elected lawmakers will receive a hearing this week, marking one of the first attempts by the new Congress to blunt the Obama Administration's regulatory efforts to achieve unpopular "green" goals.
"After failing to legislatively enact cap-and-trade emissions regulations, the Obama Administration relied on a perverted interpretation of the Clean Air Act. America rang in the new year to new rules on energy and manufacturing that could cause our nation's economic engine to seize up," said Dana Joel Gattuso, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs.
On February 9, the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on the discussion draft of "The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011." This proposal, set to be introduced by Senator James Inhofe and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, specifies that the Clean Air Act is not to be used to address climate change and thereby bars EPA regulators from imposing and enforcing carbon restrictions based on the Act.
Regulations imposed by the Obama Administration on greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources that went into effect on January 2 could return the American economy to the conditions from which it is still trying to recover. According to Dr. Margo Thorning, chief economist at the American Council for Capital Formation, U.S. investment could decline by five to 15 percent -- a decline as large as was seen at the beginning of the current recession in late 2007.
Furthermore, the Affordable Power Alliance estimates 2.5 million jobs will be destroyed by 2030, and household incomes will decrease by $1,200 a year while consumer prices will increase. In particular, the Alliance points out the discriminatory nature of the new rule, noting: "The EPA regulation will impact low income groups, the elderly and minorities disproportionately, both because they have lower incomes to begin with, but also because they have to spend proportionately more of their incomes..."
"What the Obama Administration is ramming down America's throat is a cap without the trade, and it could plunge our nation further into recessionary despair," added the National Center for Public Policy Research's Gattuso. "This hearing on the Upton-Inhofe proposal is the first step in putting accountable, elected representatives back in charge of the duties assigned to them by our Constitution."
The National Center For Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters, and receives less than one percent of its revenue from corporate sources.
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