The Environmental Leader reports:
In her first speech as head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy has urged businesses to view climate change as an opportunity. She also said the agency’s experience with auto efficiency standards shows how it might work fruitfully with industry to craft regulations.
Of course, anybody who has any experience with EPA knows that EPA doesn’t “work fruitfully” so much as it “works coercively” with business.
EPA is a bully that has little, if anything, at stake in regulatory proceedings. The laws it operates under were written by radical enviros and enacted into law by naive and trusting legislators and presidents. When challenges do make it to court, rulings are typically handed-down either by enviro-loving judges or judges who lack any real-world understanding of how the EPA operates.
The car industry? In addition to being heavily regulated by EPA, much of it has been owned by the government since 2009. There is nothing fair, voluntary, fruitful about the relationship.
Since the snotty college boys who hate the oil industry that Washington sends to factories to tell the factories how to run know nothing about how to run a factory, they are not there to reduce explosions. They are there to force their agenda on to the factories.
Regulation is about control, not safety, health, environment or whatever else government marketing tells you.
If you have the cause of the Texas fertilizer plant explosion, I’m sure your insight would be welcome. I’ve found no reports indicating they have defined the cause. Also, news of a recent propane plant explosion in TEXAS is not well published. There was one in Florida. Like the Texas explosion, the cause of the Florida explosion is not yet known. Again, Mr. Bell, has very unique causal knowledge. Based on about 25 years experience in the chemical industry, I can guess what might have happened, but also based on that experience, I’ve learned that guesses are often wrong.
I confess to a slightly smaller sin, a Tahoe. But I’m sure I get pennance points by also driving an ’89 Camry.
PS: we were on about the EPA rather than OSHA, although the broad point of keeping the regulatory beast on a chain applies to both.
Howdy Robert Bell
Your hyperbole is linked to a false choice.
Most libertarians agree that there’s a role for government and many agree that safety regulations are an appropriate government role. Then you have to figure out where to put the limits.
Every reasonable person wants fertilizer and propane available at a reasonable cost. Every reasonable person wants the plant intact and the employees safe — including the management.
Your comment is phrased as if management’s only stake in safety was regulatory coercion. Management has more of a stake in the plant’s safety from a productivity point of view, and more of a stake in the workers’ safety from a liability point of view, then they do from a regulatory coercion point of view.
According to Gore and Co, owning a Suburban is an especially heinous crime to be investigated by the SUV.
“I notice that the feds have never answered that…”
Indeed. The authority to require anything you want to includes the authority to issue conflicting, mutually exclusive requirements.
Howdy Gamecock
Two points:
“Once you accept that the government has the authority to require seat belts, for example, they have the authority to require anything they want to.” Only too true, which is why I have doubts about requiring so much as headlights.
2nd: If the guideline for what may be required is safety, and if the CAFE standards have a harmful effect on safety because little cars fly farther than big cars do, then the CAFE standards clearly violate the safety principle. I notice that the feds have never answered that…
You are absolutely correct about CAFE standards.
But . . .
Once you accept that the government has the authority to require seat belts, for example, they have the authority to require anything they want to. And they now have hundreds of thousands of employees working on what they will require.
The debate in Congress in the early 60s should have ended with the agreement that the government doesn’t have the authority to mandate seatbelts. Instead, they talked about whether or not seatbelts were a good idea, and once the consensus was a good idea, they mandated it. Now, Congress debates so much as to whether or not things are a good or bad idea. They never debate whether they have the Constitutional authority to act. Ipso facto, we now have a fascist government (i.e., private ownership of business, with strong, autocratic central government control).
The problem is, you can’t have a little regulation. Once the genie is out of the bottle, government will go wild. Government expansion over the last 50 years has been obscene.
The solution is wholesale deletion of Federal alphabet agencies. Ag makes no food, Energy makes no energy, FDA makes no drugs, Education educates no one.
I suppose the importance of the CAFE standards to the public are reflected in the ever popular light truck and suv sales.
One more entry in my dictionary of inverted words. Fruitful: making sure nobody can reap the fruits of his labour.
Same relation as “progressive” is to progress and “liberal” to liberty.
I’m sure Ms. McCarthy is referring to the CAFE standards as “fruitful.”
The CAFE standards are exactly a fascist example: government coercing the public through coercion of private business. When government compels the automakers to produce cars to its specs, it coerces me to buy them.
When it comes to safety elements, maybe there’s a point, although die-harder-than-me libertarians would dispute even that (seatbelts, airbags). But when it comes to features like fuel economy or a backup camera, I’d like to make up my own mind.
I gave up on the editorial board of Reader’s Digest when one of their writers referred to the 35mpg CAFE as a “Christmas present.”