The shameful Obama Administration practice of proposing dreadful environmental regulations on or near national holidays continues. Last year they were on global warming, and this year it’s low-level ozone. Neither regulation will have a detectable “benefit,” but both impose enormous costs. Perhaps President Obama’s placing this announcement in the news cycle just before Thanksgiving and Black Friday is indicative of how popular he thinks these regulations will be.
So it goes. The lessons of November 4 remain unlearned, with the administration doubling down in the service of all of its green friends that didn’t vote. The fact is that the ground zero of the thermonuclear electoral explosion three weeks ago was in the coal mining areas of Kentucky and West Virginia. In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell was supposedly in a close race with Alison Grimes and instead won by a whopping 18 points. Nick Rahall, a 19-term (!) Democratic congressman from West Virginia saw a similar swing: he won his seat by eight points in 2012 and lost by 10 in 2014, with the net change in two years totaling 18.
The proposed ozone rules are yet another example of what happens when good ideas go bad. Pretty much everyone agrees that EPA, along with the states, have done a remarkable job in cleaning up our air. The eye-stinging smogs of Los Angeles are history. Pittsburgh was once so dirty that masonry turned black, causing people to wonder what was happening in their lungs. We have done great things and enjoy air that is cleaner than that of any economic superpower in the history of this planet.
Environmental protection is what systems engineers call a “heuristic device,” defined as “a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal, but is good enough for a given set of goals.” The problem, of course, is that heuristic devices don’t tell you when to stop. Instead they keep being applied, in this case by the bureaucracy-for-life known as the Environmental Protection Agency, producing massively diminishing returns for massively increased costs. And, at President Obama’s urging, it will never hear the word “stop.”
Millions of people are increasingly disenchanted with the administration’s high-handed approach to command-and-control regulations imposed when we aren’t supposed to be looking. If enough people remain grumpy about this, Barack Obama may yet again stand in the way of a Hillary Clinton presidency.