“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency soft-pedals rigorous analysis showing its policies kill growth and jobs while trumpeting as truth junk analysis portraying burdensome regulations as economically beneficial,” says the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
It’s editorial continues:
A new National Taxpayers Union (ntu.org) study makes the mendacity clear: The EPA publicly proclaims bogus findings from its second report on the Clean Air Act’s costs and benefits that fit its anti-growth agenda — but is mum about that report’s contradictory findings of economic harm.
The EPA loves to talk about that report’s cost-benefit analysis projecting up to $2 trillion in annual economic benefits by 2020 from air quality regulations. But that’s based on surveys of people’s “willingness to pay” to avoid slightly greater health risks — not on anything that actually adds to economic output or employment.
The agency would rather not talk about the report’s macroeconomic analysis. It says such regulations cut Gross Domestic Product in 2010 by $32 billion to $79 billion and could result by 2020 in anything from a $110 billion loss to a $5 billion gain — far smaller than that highly suspect $2 trillion in “benefits.”
No agency should base public policy on junk analysis serving anti-growth ideology — but the out-of-control EPA does.
This issue is also discussed in the JunkScience.com report, “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is.”
It is time to start planning the next American victory celebration.
The “Victory for the Environment” Day or VE Day. After 41 years of hard effort, the entire USA has achieved “Clean Air” by the definitions in force at the First Earth Day in 1970. That was when the US population set out in earnest to cleanse our Air and return our Waters from open sewers.
We will be the first developed country to have achieved this status. The Waters have reached such cleanliness a little while ago. There are Salmon in the Atlantic Rivers now, and the Cayahugo river no longer catches fire. At the same time North America is a net Carbon sink, according to peer reviewed scientific papers, never refuted by teams of scientists working at Princeton University. So we emit no Net CO2, and absorb via bio-sequestration in our vast multi-use land set-asides, a large amount from Eurasia. It is another Victory for American Exceptionalism.
By todays tightened standards, there are only two metropolitan areas that still do not have “Clean Air, but both Houston and its refineries, and the accidental geography of the Los Angeles basin are areas where we have made tremendous progress, but are not quite finished achieving “Clean Air”.
Every where else, we no longer have metropolitan-wide endemic pollution, but do and will always have “technical violations” limited in time and space. (If your house catches fire, the street on which you dwell will have smoky, sooty, unclean air, until the Fire Department can extinguish the blaze.) One or two of the hundreds of air sensors in your metropolitan area, will duly report that air quality was violated for one or two 15 minute intervals.
Wow. EPA has been exaggerating the benefits and grossly underestimating the costs of its regulations for at least 35 years and the press is just now beginning to notice.