Oh, Oh! EPA Official Explains His Totalarian Philosophy of Enforcement. Crucify Them!

Oh, Oh! EPA Official Explains His Totalarian Philosophy of Enforcement. Crucify Them! by The Elephant's Child

April 26, 2012, 5:35 pm
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Energy, Environment, Law | Tags: Make Examples of Them, Rogue EPA

Every once in a while. a government official blurts out the truth about departmental activities in a way that gets picked up by the media, and it goes viral. Ans so it was when EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz confirmed the widespread suspicion that the EPA is at war with the oil and gas industries.

Oil and gas is an enforcement priority. It’s one of seven, so we are going to spend a fair amount of time looking at oil and gas production.

The top-ranking EPA official goes on to explain his philosophy of policy enforcement:

I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff…the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

Ans so you make examples of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.

And companies that are smart see that they don’t want to play that game and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly.

That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly.

“So, that’s our general philosophy,” he adds.

Exactly. And it isn’t just the Romans, the SS used to do that too. It’s how totalitarians act. And it’s why we’ve been calling the EPA an out-of-control agency that needs to be abolished. We have the examples of the Sacketts who were going to build their dream home with a view of the lake— and the EPA descended on them calling their suburban lot a “wetland” and fining them $75,000 a day until they had returned their graded lot to its natural state, and $37.500 a day for violating the law, and another $37,500 for something or other. The Supreme Court put an end to that.

And then there is Gibson Guitars who were shut down because the wood they imported with the full approval of Madagascar for frets didn’t comply with the American interpretation of Madagascar law. And the threat endangered every guitarist with a Gibson guitar.

EPA Administrator Armendariz took on Texas’ Range Resources with an emergency order issued by EPA Region 6 which it justified by making unfounded claims that because of fracking “houses could explode.” Interviews with the EPA warned  repeatedly of the “danger of fires and explosions.” That case was another legal embarrassment for the EPA.

In attempting to shut down coal-fired power plants, the EPA has claimed that their efforts to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions would yield $290 billion in health and welfare benefits in 2014, and that it would prevent up to 36,000 premature deaths, 26,000 hospital and emergency-room visits and 240,000 cased of aggravated asthma. This is absolute hooey. Physicians don’t know the cause of asthma, and giving a number of “premature” deaths to be prevented is absurd.

This is the way the EPA operates, with lies and made up statistics and enormous fines. They intend to scare their victims into instant compliance with the EPA grab for power. They need to be stopped.  Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has launched an investigation into the Obama-EPA tactics towards domestic energy production in the light of their recent efforts to frighten the public about safe hydraulic fracturing.

 

3 Comments

3 Comments so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI