EPA suddenly retreating on emissions rules enforcement

As if Barack Obama didn’t have enough trouble with the progressive revolt this week after the tax compromise, the New York Times reports today on another retreat that will have Obama’s base even further outraged.  Until now, the EPA had threatened to go around a hostile Congress to enforce Obama’s goals on greenhouse-gas emissions, perhaps going as far as to pursue a de facto carbon cap.  Suddenly, after the disastrous midterms, the EPA wants more time to study the science first:

The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.

The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.

Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs.

The delays represent a marked departure from the first two years of the Obama presidency, when the E.P.A. moved quickly to reverse one Bush environmental policy after another. Administration officials now face the question of whether in their zeal to undo the Bush agenda they reached too far and provoked an unmanageable political backlash.

Well, perhaps they need more time to study that, but how hard is it to count the seats Democrats lost in the midterm elections?  Almost as easy to count the seats in the Senate they’ll lose if the Obama administration continues to pursue its regulatory expansion.

Not surprisingly, this has won the White House plaudits from groups on the Right for pulling the leash at EPA.  The National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute both praised the delay, with the NAM saying that Obama had “clearly heard the calls from manufacturers.”  That seems less apparent than having heard the will of the voters in the past election, and perhaps finally realizing that threatened expansion of regulation was killing any impulse for job-creating growth.

Make no mistake about it — the new rules would have cost jobs, probably in the mid-six figures or higher.  The minority caucus on the Senate EPW committee produced a report on these regulations and their impact at the end of September, which was roundly ignored by Obama at the time.  Now with the EPA’s funding on the line as well as hundreds of thousands of jobs, suddenly the EPA wants to proceed with more “caution.”  It’s not a surrender, but even a tactical retreat is likely to stir another eruption on Obama’s Left.

Update: It may be too late for one power plant:

Operating in eastern New Jersey since 1969, Oyster Creek nuclear power station, the country’s oldest nuclear plant, is scheduled to close its doors ten years earlier than planned, its owner Exelon Corp. announced today. Oyster Creek is now being called the first casualty of new water cooling emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Originally scheduled to close in 2029, the plant will now shut its doors in 2019, rather than invest hundreds of billions of dollars to comply with the new standards. “The plant faces a unique set of economic conditions and changing environmental regulations,” said Chief Operating Officer and President Chris Crane, “that make ending operations in 2019 the best option for the company, employees and shareholders.”

Oyster Creek relies on the use of about 1.4 billion gallons of water a day from the Barnegat Bay. Environmental groups said the plant’s usage was harming the ecosystem. So in exchange for shutting down early, the plant gets to operate for the next ten years without building cooling towers aimed at reducing its water intake.

How many jobs will that cost, and how much will it hike energy prices in the area?  And what will replace it?

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