Bankruptcy

Government Regulation Gone Bad

By mcbride

On one hand, human behavior needs some regulation, at some point.  On the other hand, giving the government power to regulate means that there can and will be abuses by the regulators.  Ed Wallace’s recent column points out the hazards of out of control regulators.  Longtime bureaucrat, Carole Browner, is the main subject of his article.  She has evidently falsified a report on offshore drilling.  However, prior to this event, Ms. Browner was head of the EPA and had many issues with the truth there, also according to Mr. Wallace. 

“Carol Browner’s EPA publicly stated on numerous occasions that MTBE was not any sort of contamination problem for people, ignoring the EPA’s own internal study and the 1992 disaster in Alaska. But the EPA was also caught being duplicitous in 1995, when the American Petroleum Institute brought a lawsuit against them for being required to use ethanol in lieu of MTBE. The EPA’s own attorneys had to admit that adding ethanol to the gasoline supply would in fact create more smog, not less.

Despite the fact that oil companies were well aware of the problem, Tom Delay introduced in Congress a ‘hold harmless’ bill, to protect oil companies from suits resulting from the effects of MTBE in our gasoline.

Imagine that. One side of our government was arguing for an extremely unsafe toxin in our gas supplies - while proposing to shield companies that knew how bad it was and used it anyway. The other side was cheering on an additive that creates more smog. Everyone was apparently oblivious to the fact that in modern cars’ engines, computers now set the fuel oxygen levels for maximum mileage and lowest emissions.

It all became moot in 2006, when Santa Monica had to shut off the city’s water supplies because of MTBE contamination. It was reported that one cup of this additive was all it took to ruin the city’s entire water supply. Santa Monica had to spend huge amounts of money to pipe in emergency water from points north.”

Here is a link to the entire article: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/11/26/2660172/its-all-too-much.html

Michael

Full post as published by Texas Lawyer Blog on November 30, 2010 (boomark / email).