For the past several months, Texans have gotten the distinct impression that the Obama administration is out to get them. J.E. Dyer is surely going to add fuel to that fire in his discussion on the "EPA's War on Texas."
From the arbitrary decision to not display one of the space shuttle orbiters in Houston, home of Mission Control, to the war on the oil and gas industry, Texas has felt the brunt of President Barack Obama's ire. Now the EPA, according to Dyer, is about to take a considerable amount of power generation capacity in Texas off line with new, draconian air quality regulations.
Basically, the EPA has already decided that the state permitting system for power plants is inadequate and is requiring that every power plant and industrial facility reapply for operating permits on the federal level. It is suggested that this will increase the cost of operation without actually improving air quality.
The bottom line is that the EPA is about to take away 5700 MW of electrical power generation in Texas by making certain coal fired plants too expensive to operate. This will be capacity that will be very difficult to replace, not to mention increase. Nuclear power already has considerable regulatory hurdles that make building new power plants more difficult than was the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza.
The Obama administration is already moving to stop production of oil and natural gas, especially using the newly developed "fracking" process. Wind, solar and biomass, favored by the Obama administration, are technologies that are currently too immature and unreliable to be of any help.
Why is the Obama administration messing with Texas? One motive, at least from the standpoint of the EPA, is a sort of environmental zealotry that moves sound environmental regulation from the realm of cost/benefit analysis and scientific evidence to that of a religious cult. Objective reality take a back seat to the imperative that the more regulations that are imposed, the better. The practical effects have not any meaning in this case. Inputs matter more as a metric than doe outputs.
A more sinister motive may stem from the fact of Texas' relative economic success in a period of economic malaise. This has proven to be a considerable embarrassment to the Obama administration, whose economic stewardship has been less than stellar.
Also, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is emerging as a possible future rival for the president in 2012. The nightmare the president and his men have is Perry facing off in a debate with the Texas governor boasting of the relative economic success of his state, with promises to bring that success nationwide. Even the standard excuse that Obama inherited an economy from George W. Bush won't wash. So did Perry and he has done well with that inheritance.
So, at least the theory goes, how better to blunt Perry's appeal than to wreck the economy of Texas through over-regulation? It may seem far-fetched. But it does bespeak of the sort of Chicago style strategy of punishing one's enemies that Obama has favored, albeit on an epic scale.
Of course, there is every chance that such a move will backfire. Bringing recalcitrant states to heel through economic terrorism only works when people are terrified. But when they get angry, then watch out. The slogan "Don't mess with Texas" is not just some advertising gimmick, after all.
Texas resident Mark Whittington writes about state issues for the Yahoo! Contributor Network
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