_FOXNews.com

George Russell

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that will give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June.

The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academies of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts and about half as many National Academies staff.

Its aim: how to integrate sustainability “as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to be “providing guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.”


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_*Thanks to the Committee for American Resource Self-Reliance! _

Hot Air

Tina Korbe

Bet you’ll never guess which country is the world’s largest holder of natural gas, oil and coal resources combined. That’s right. This country. According to a report released today by the Institute for Energy Research, the United States has 1.4 trillion barrels of recoverable reserves of oil — or more than the entire world has used in 150 years. That’s enough to fuel the United States for the next 250 years. Add natural gas and coal resources to that and we’re good to go for all the foreseeable future.

But, thanks to backward energy policies, we’re still dependent on foreign sources of oil. What is perhaps even worse — at least at a time of 8.6 percent unemployment — is that those backward energy policies that restrict access to our own resources also force us to forgo badly needed jobs. Research shows that reduced job creation — not increased layoffs — explains the high unemployment we have now. Here is a readymade way to create jobs, which, again, the president says is his top priority. In fact, the IER report shows we could create 1 million jobs just by (1) unlocking more federal lands, (2) developing shale resources and (3) eliminating excessive regulation.

Why, why, why is this controversial again? I understand that fossil fuels are nonrenewable and that people are properly concerned about the potential for their total depletion. But what good does it do to conserve them just to never use them? Or, better, why is it so hard to grasp that depletion is hundreds and hundreds of years away?

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