Volume 157, No. 172 covering the 1st Session of the 112th Congress (2011 - 2012) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“OVERREGULATION” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S7336 on Nov. 10, 2011.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
OVERREGULATION
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. INHOFE. It is my understanding that I have as much as 5 minutes.
Mr. President, I appreciate very much what has been described. Perhaps people can look at this in terms of the overregulation we are doing in this country, the fact that there is a direct relationship between the amount of revenue that comes into the government and the amount of regulations.
I have always used this--in fact, it is still permissible to use it. According to OMB, for each 1 percent addition to the GDP, it creates an additional $50 billion of revenue. There are other ways of doing it other than tax increases.
To turn it around, look at what this administration has done. They have regulations such as the greenhouse gas regulation, which would be between a $300 billion and $400 bill loss each year. The ozone--which they postponed, but nevertheless they proposed it--would be $676 billion in lost GDP. You can do your math on that. For each 1 percent--
and 1 percent is $140 billion--for each 1 percent, it would be about a
$50 billion loss in revenue. Boiler MACT is a $1 billion loss in GDP. Utility MACT, which is what they have been talking about, across State lines, is $140 billion in compliance costs. Cement MACT--all of these are huge losers in terms of revenue that can be generated.
So I would only like to say--and I wish I had time to get into more detail on this--that shortly we will be voting on McCain amendment No. 928. It has a lot of great features in it, but one that has been almost overlooked is the feature that would take away the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. This was the Upton-Inhofe bill. My bill, actually, was tested here, and we had a majority of people who were in support of it. It passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives.
So part of this amendment addresses what would have been done by the Waxman-Markey bill, which would cost us, not just once but every year, between $300 billion and $400 billion. The big question was, since the President could not get this body to pass a bill on cap and trade, he decided he would do it through regulation. But doing it through regulation would still cost between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. So what they had to do was to come up with an endangerment finding.
That endangerment finding was based on flawed science. In fact, we have a recent response to a request by the IG of the EPA who said, in fact, that was true--that the science on which this was based was faulty science. So after we realized that--and everyone else realized it--we went back to these people who were on record opposing the legislation regulating greenhouse gases and tried to get a bill passed that would take away the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. So that is what this was all about.
We were not able to get that, but that provision is in amendment No. 928 by Senator McCain and others. I hope people will realize, in addition to those things being talked about, and the new jobs that would come with the passage of that amendment, there is also this provision which would be a huge boost to our economy and would eliminate an unnecessary tax increase of between $300 billion and $400 billion a year.
With that, I yield the floor.
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