Obama’s Ozone Action Shows Internal Conflicts

Below is an article my husband posted over at National Review Online (link here):

The president today told the EPA not to continue with action on new ozone standards until 2013 (January 19, perhaps?). An outright cancellation of the rule-making would have been better, but this illustrates that the president is trying to juggle the certainty of destroying many thousands of jobs with the demands of Big Green (who would rather like to see those jobs destroyed). In fact, the main implication of this delay is that the president clearly rejects Lisa Jackson’s outrageous claims that environmental regulations lead to more jobs. If they did create jobs he wouldn’t have taken this action.

My colleague Myron Ebell spells out the political calculations:

What is shameful about the President’s decision to delay the new ozone rule is that it’s all about improving his chances of being re-elected and has nothing to do with the economic damage that the rule would do. The fact that the President still wants to go ahead after he gets re-elected with a regulation that has been estimated to cost $1 trillion a year shows that he could care less about the U. S. economy and the millions of people who have lost their jobs.

In other words, he wants to wait until the economy recovers before he starts destroying it again.

— Iain Murray is the author of Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You.