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Ken Cuccinelli on Environment |
Prior to assuming the office of Attorney General, Ken was a small business owner and partner in the law firm of Cuccinelli & Day, in Fairfax. He was a business law attorney with a particular focus on serving as an outsourced general counsel to small and mid-sized companies. His wide range of experience included litigation, licensing, financing, employment, advertising, branding, corporate formation, business transactions and contracts for both domestic and international clients. Ken also had experience in public interest, constitutional law and property rights cases.
My concern was that in making such huge financial sacrifices in terms of lost jobs, higher energy costs, and more expensive food and consumer products, we needed to make sure that the environmental regulations thrust on the country were based on the best science available; that for the incredible price we were paying, those regulations had a good chance of working.
Rather than establish a daily limit for the sediment, the EPA instead elected to regulate the amount of water that flowed into the creek, as if water were the pollutant. Unfortunately for the EPA, the Clean Water Act specifically spells out a comprehensive list of the types of pollutants that it can regulate, and water is definitely not one of them.
The agency moved forward to require the state to cut the creek's maximum water flow (not the sediment flow) in half! To achieve that kind of massive reduction, people near the Accotinik would be forced to build structures to capture and retain stormwater to prevent excess runoff into the creek. This edict gave the EPA a new power, effectively allowing it to regulate water runoff (not just pollutant runoff) from private property.
The problem was that the OSM's newly "discovered" authority had never been authorized by Congress. This overreach by the OSM was clearly illegal, in defiance of Congress, and a usurpation of state authority.
Unfortunately, I can't say that I was surprised. During his presidential campaign, Obama had said unabashedly that he wanted to put the coal industry out of business. He felt it was too harmful for the environment. For the government to continue to let the industry exist, despite the fact that coal provides nearly half of all electricity for the US, as well as jobs for some of the poorest areas of the country. The OSM's move showed that this promise to bankrupt the coal industry was a promise the president was intent on keeping.
Cuccinelli has been sharply critical of the Occupy movement; he has discussed published reports about an increase in rat populations around Occupy DC camps. Then he's turned to the DC pest-control law and painted it as an example of ridiculous regulation. The DC law "doesn't allow them to kill the dang rats," Cuccinelli said in a Jan. 13 interview. "They have to capture them in families." Cuccinelli said the law requires relocation of the trapped rats [including] setting them free in Virginia.
The law cited by Cuccinelli does prohibit using various traps to catch some kinds of urban wildlife. The law also calls for catching animals alive and relocating whole pest families when possible. But here's the catch: The pardon does not extend to rats. The first page of the law specifically exempts "commensal rodents"--common rats and mice that pilfer human food. So Cuccinelli got it wrong.
