Lisa Jackson at Berkeley Law
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Yesterday, Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment hosted a public presentation by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. She delivered brief prepared remarks, then took a lot of questions. She didn’t announce any new policy initiatives, but she did make it clear that she (and the President) are not going to cave to pressure from Republicans in the House.
Jackson did seem glad to be well outside the Beltway for a while, and who can blame her? She noted that the House has taken some 170 anti-environmental votes this term, more than one for every day it has been in session. And she’s been called in for a number of grillings. Although she faced some difficult questions in Berkeley, she noted that at least Dan Farber, who moderated the questions, didn’t frame each of them as a five-minute tirade against the EPA, and that she was actually given time to respond. She didn’t shy away from any of the questions, which covered the gamut from the delay in issuing new ozone regulations to EPA’s role in the Keystone Pipeline decision to regulation of concentrated animal feeding operations and of …
If I didn’t know better, I’d think Blanche Lincoln was trying to fool us. The former Senator currently heads the National Federation of Independent Business’s anti-regulatory campaign, and is in DC today to push for a freeze on new regulations. For her accompanying op-ed in Politico, how would she make the case that regulations are a huge problem?
Back in August, Lincoln wrote that regulations cost the U.S. economy $1.75 trillion a year, according to a report commissioned by the Small Business Administration in September 2010. But that study was thoroughly debunked, by a CPR paper, by the Congressional Research Service, and by the Economic Policy Institute.
Two people, CPR President Rena Steinzor and Public Citizen President Robert Weissman, specifically criticized Lincoln’s use of the thoroughly debunked number. In a subsequent post, Lincoln didn’t mention “$1.75 trillion” but instead …
