More than 5,000 people have signed a petition crafted by The Heartland Institute demanding that Congress “rein in the Environmental Protection Agency” through deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the agency.
According to the Citizen’s Petition to Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA has “lost its war to scare America into giving [it] legislation that would allow [it] to seize control of virtually all energy production and use, [and is] perverting the Clean Air law to give [itself] unprecedented powers to regulate American society.”
Heartland says it will publicly present the petitions to Congress once the drive hits 10,000 signatures.
Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, says that in the name of fighting global warming, EPA has become a “rogue agency,” spending $9 billion in 2012 alone to shackle individuals and businesses with expensive and wasteful compliance orders and mandates without the consent of Congress. According to Bast:
“The toll EPA is now taking on our country is staggering, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work at a time when millions of people are out of work and our reliance on foreign sources of energy threatens to compromise the nation’s security. The solution is to rein in EPA through deep cuts in the size, power, and cost of the agency. This can be done by Congress, through its control over the government’s purse, or by a president willing to put sound science and a strong economy ahead of the demands of environmental extremists.”
Read the petition and background essay by The Heartland Institute here. For more comments or to book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Tammy Nash at [email protected] and 312/377-4000. After regular business hours, contact Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/731-9364.
The Heartland Institute is a 28-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
Joseph Bast is a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute. He cofounded Heartland in 1984, serving as executive director then as president & CEO until January 2018. His research and writing focuses on climate change and energy policy.
