When regulatory creep leads to permitting inertia

November 28, 2011 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

From the Washington Examiner:

Anybody who wonders why the U.S. economy continues to stagger along with 9 percent unemployment and an anemic 2 percent quarterly growth rate need look no further than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Under President Obama’s hand-picked administrator, Lisa Jackson, EPA is hog-tying the economy with dozens of proposed major new rules. One of them, which is aimed at coal-fired power plants that generate electricity, will add at least $18 billion in compliance costs by 2020. As Kathleen White of the Texas Public Policy Center told the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this year, “never in its 40-year history has EPA promulgated — at the same time — so many costly new regulatory dictates. The rules on track to go into effect in the next three years could cost more than $1 trillion and result in hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.”

It’s not just the raft of new rules that is killing economic growth, however. Jackson and her EPA minions have been purposefully slow-walking the agency’s already hideously complex process for approving permits in a crucial sector of the energy industry.