Review & Outlook: Inside the EPA - WSJ.com

Memos show that even other regulators worry about its rule-making.
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The Environmental Protection Agency claims that the critics of its campaign to remake U.S. electricity are partisans, but it turns out that they include other regulators and even some in the Obama Administration. In particular, a trove of documents uncovered by Congressional investigators reveals that these internal critics think the EPA is undermining the security and reliability of the U.S. electric power supply.

With its unprecedented wave of rules, the EPA is abusing traditional air-quality laws to force a large share of the coal-fired fleet to shut down. Amid these sacrifices on the anticarbon altar, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski and several House committees have been asking, well, what happens after as much as 8% of U.S. generating capacity is taken off the grid?

Articles: Obama's Interior Chokehold on America

Keeping Americans out of work. Denying struggling state and local governments billions of dollars in additional revenue. Making us more dependent on energy imports. Is this the change Mr. Obama says we can believe in?

Or can we only believe in shovel-ready jobs if they're created by the alternative energy industry? Would we even be having this yearlong debate if solar energy producers contributed more than $12 billion a year in tax and royalty revenues to state and federal treasuries? What if hydro energy producers accounted for $44 billion of GDP? The only thing separating 190,000 Americans from a paycheck and states from more than $7 billion in local taxes is obvious: Political will.

Climate Resistance » Environment, ‘Justice’, ‘Fairness’

It is no use discussing the rights and wrongs of climate change and energy policies and their scientific bases when, it seems, we have lost any sense of what we want energy for. The loss of this idea — that energy creates the possibility of real opportunities for longer, more rewarding and more comfortable lives — has allowed the likes of Friends of the Earth to enter the debate with their entirely degraded notion of ‘justice’ — one completely subsumed by their commitment to an absurd ideal of ‘nature’ and life ‘in balance’ with it. This notion of justice turns out to be, much less a liberating idea, but an idea which calls for increased intervention in and control over people’s lives — especially those it claims to want to help — for behaviour change, and for policies which ignore the interests and desires of people. The better argument is about more than merely ‘keeping the lights on’.