Right-o.
Climatewire reports,
Gov. Rick Perry’s failed bid at the Republican nomination for president seems to have cut a once formidable political force down to size in his own state, possibly giving Texas green groups an opportunity they’ve been looking for…
Now that candidate Perry is once again simply Gov. Perry, environmentalists in Austin are hopeful that hard positions can be moderated, perhaps helping EPA and Texas find a way forward on the fight over EPA’s Cross-state Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) and greenhouse gas emissions in a much less contentious way.
“I think that his return to the state and focusing on the governorship gives him an opportunity to rethink some of the stances that he’s taken in especially the last year or so, particularly with regard to the conflict between the governor and EPA over air pollution regulation,” said Ken Kramer, director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club…
Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, agrees. Though Texas has won a temporary reprieve from EPA’s CSAPR implementation, the case has put into question complaints by coal plant operators that the regulations hurt Texas.
“I think the fervor of the anti-EPA position will decline some for two reasons,” he said. “One, he’s not running for president. And two, the impact on emitters has been cast into doubt by the court’s recent decision on CSAPR, and it’s unlikely that that will be reinvigorated between now and … the election”…
The Texas environmental activists quoted in the climate wire story do not know Rick Perry. His stalward opposition to EPA’s train wreck rules was not manufactured for his presidential campaign but is a long -standing positiion. Rick Perry has long known knows that state authority does a much better job of managing air quality without impeding economic growth than EPA’s scientifically unjustified, one-size-fits-all ineffective overkill. And Perry has never been hesitant to call things according to the facts. Rick Perry understands that EPA is unlawfully operating as if a 4th branch of government outside constitutional checks and balances. Our Governor did not pick EPA as a politically expedient villain. Like Ronald Reagan, he fully understands that federal rule by an unelected elite in bureaucracies ruptures our form of government as a representative democracy with enumerated federal powers. State are not branch offices of the federal government.