First state to phase in new environmental Clean Air permits
Unknown to most citizens, the air is now the cleanest in living memory. In 2011, every Indiana community met all national air quality standards for the first time in the history of the Clean Air Act.
Last year, we wiped out the last of a 550-case
backlog of old, and therefore less strict, environmental permits, and are now the only state completely current. Our goal for 2012 is to maintain this status and, if national limits are lowered yet again, to find a way to meet those standards, too.
Source: Indiana 2012 State of the State Address
, Jan 10, 2012
Rename EPA as Employment Prevention Agency
The EPA (which probably should be renamed the Employment Prevention Agency) declared with no statutory basis at all that it had the power to regular carbon dioxide, which is necessary to live on this planet, as a dangerous pollutant, on par with mercury
or lead. A compliant judiciary somehow found a way to defer. Not only has Congress never empowered the EPA to limit CO2, it has expressly refused to do so on multiple occasions, even when asked by President Obama during the highly compliant
111th Congress. No problem. The unelected EPA and the unelected federal judiciary collaborated to redefine CO2 on their own, unleashing the agency to pursue the irrational, horrendously expensive,
job-killing policy of carbon limitation despite the nonagreement of "the people's branch" [the legislature].
Reduced air pollution in 23 non-compliant counties
In Indiana we have made enormous headway by clearing out a backlog of some 450 expired air and water permits. In some cases, these had been pending for more than 20 years.
I came to understand why the businesses involved were not complaining: new permits invariably require lower limits and tighter restrictions than the expired version.
When, in 2011, the last of these antique permits was rewritten, we had reduced collective emissions by thousands of tons per year. In 2010, Indiana also hit a benchmark in air quality. For the first time since the passage of the
1970 Clean Air Act, all 92 counties in the state met all applicable federal clean air standards. In 2004, air tests had revealed that twenty-three counties and one township didn't meet the federal standards.
