Senator introduces 3 bills to stop EPA regulations

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) introduced a trio of bills meant to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) air pollution regulations.

In introducing the bills on the Senate floor Tuesday, Flake said the EPA has gone too far with overreaching and unreasonable regulations of late and he wants to protect Americans and the economy from the agency’s actions.

{mosads}“All of us are in favor of protecting the environment and the air that we breathe,” he said. “But I think that we are not in favor of an EPA that places surreal regulations over common sense.”

All of his bills have multiple Republican co-sponsors and were introduced last year but did not move.

The first bill, the Ozone Regulatory Delay and Extension of Assessment Length (ORDEAL) Act, would remove the requirement from the Clean Air Act that the EPA reassess every five years whether its standards for ground-level ozone and other air pollutants need to be tightened.

Flake said the five-year timeline allows groups to sue the EPA for missing deadlines and forces the EPA into new regulations.

The legislation would double the time between reviews to 10 years.

The Commonsense Legislative Exceptional Events Reform (CLEER) Act is meant to better protect states and localities if their air pollution concentrations spike due to natural events.

The EPA instituted a rule to that effect in 2007, but it does not work as it should, Flake said.

The final bill, the Agency Paygo for Greenhouse Gases Act, would require the EPA to reduce its budget whenever it institutes greenhouse gas regulations that cost money to other federal agencies.

Similar to a rule adopted by the Republican Senate, each dollar in costs imposed on other agencies would have to be offset by a dollar in the EPA’s budget when the agency proposes any greenhouse gas rule, Flake said.