THE UNCERTAINTY TAX

Submit for your approval…you are sitting on your front porch sipping on tea when you see a truck pass by…the truck is spewing smoke..and generally stinking up the neighborhood.  You head to your garage and start working on making fuels cleaner.

You invest all of your extra money…all of your free time…and after years of hard work design the perfect system.  Your system uses coal…but unlike other systems you can capture almost all of the CO2 released in the process of creating electricity from coal.

You find the perfect site…you and other investors spend millions in legal fees, engineering plans, and environmental studies…the Environmental Protection Agency issues you a permit to build your plant. Things are looking good.

You have secured the financing, bought the property, and have all the other permits needed to build your plant.  Then just as you finish the ground breaking ceremony…a letter arrives from the EPA revoking your permit.

You are out all of your money…and time that can never be recovered…you have no recourse.

The EPA did that to the Spruce Number 1 Coal Mine in West Virginia.  In an unprecedented move it revoked a permit. This means that no company that has followed the rules can have any certainty that the permit means anything.

Top Enviro-Mentalist

How does this affect you and me?  Well first off companies that require approval to build a factory, or plant can not be sure that the permits it has attained will have a hard time finding financing.  Who would issue a loan, or invest in a project that may…at any moment be cancelled? This does not just affect the investors in the project, but all of the sub-contractors, lending institutions, local, and state Governments.

For those of you that have driven through Appalachia, you are aware of the tough lives those people live.  Since the most recent popular fad is the religion of Human Caused Global Warming…a pseudo science…based in myth and lies…the EPA is now poised to use regulatory means to enforce political belief.  For Appalachia it cost them 250 jobs on this one project alone.  For the region it has cost $250 million in direct investment into the area.

Of course all of this holds to President Obama’s promise to force energy prices to skyrocket.  Who does that affect most of all?  The unemployed poor..who of course depend on our tax dollars to pay their electric bills…the working poor..who must decide between food and clothing or keeping the lights on.  Of course it also impacts companies who must charge more for goods and services to pay to keep the conveyors running.

The EPA is not about protecting the environment…it is about protecting and enforcing political dogma based on a unfounded theories…extending the reach of the Federal Government into state, and local Governments, and destroying the ability of business to innovate in a way that promotes a cleaner environment.

In any discourse concerning the economy…this type of roadblock must be removed.  Returning the EPA to its original mandate is not enough.  The EPA must be completely reengineered to an agency that works on facts…not political hype.

Reference: Wall Street Journal