Tell Your Legislator to Get On Board With The TRAIN Act!

As any “Joe Sixpack” will readily admit, our country is plagued by stifling fuel prices that cuts into the pockets of all Americans. As an unfortunate consequence, companies continue to shed jobs as they shift their resources to meeting basic energy costs. Unfortunately, federal agencies such as the EPA only make the problems worse. Although the “green” arm of the federal government supposedly conducts a review of its regulatory measures, in practice it hides the cumulative impact of its actions. Take the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, for instance- although the EPA estimates that only 4.8 GW of coal-fired power plants would go out of use, more credible organizations such as Sanford Bernstein and the National Economic Research Associates (NERA) report a figure double that size. The EPA’s chronic underestimation of the impact of their policy is made worse by their admitted uncertainty; when “analyzing” their proposed utility MACT rule, for instance, they stated that “… unable to estimate the impacts on employment as a result of the increase in electricity and other energy prices in the economy.” In reality, though it is clear what the implication of such a policy would be- according to NERA, MACT would lead to a loss of 1.44 million jobs due to higher energy costs. In a struggling economy that teeters on the brink of another recession, higher fuel prices and more unemployment is the last thing that America needs.

Luckily, the House of Representatives is voting on the TRAIN Act, a bill that would counter the harmful excesses of the EPA, on September 22nd. This legislation would set up an 11 member inter-agency committee chaired by the Dept. of Commerce to conduct a cost-benefit analysis for each proposed EPA regulation, and delay implementation of national emissions standards. Such moves will provide a powerful check on the EPA’s ability to raise energy costs and harm struggling American consumers along the way. Also, the TRAIN Act would ensure that the EPA waits for a cost-benefit analysis to implement the Cross-State Air Transport Rule. This harmful new rule proposed by the agency would require power plants to make drastic cuts in their emissions in just six months. A Texas plant already announced that it could not keep up with this crippling regulation, and shut their doors to 500 workers. As if that was not enough, the NERA concludes that the adoption of the rule would cost America 11.5% more in energy prices! The TRAIN Act is an important bill for reining in the EPA’s aggressive regulatory agenda, forcing the agency to determine the cumulative impact of its costly regulations before creating new mandates on the American economy.

 

To take action, tell your legislator to support the TRAIN Act, or simply click on this link: http://action.freedomworks.org/5177/stop-epa-tell-your-congressman-to-support-train-act/