Dear friends, welcome to the August issue of BIC Magazine.
Last month, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt, who was plagued by scandal during his tenure in President Trump's cabinet, resigned. Pruitt's replacement is Andrew Wheeler, who was serving as a deputy at the EPA prior to his promotion.
As EPA chief, Pruitt was vilified by the left and environmentalists. Pruitt strongly rejected the idea that government must choose between job growth or the environment, believing the EPA can enact rules that both protect the environment and also allow the U.S. economy to prosper.
I am confident that the millions of us who work in the energy industries all want a clean and healthy environment -- as do Pruitt, Wheeler and all who believe in limited government and the free enterprise system.
During the Obama administration, the EPA passed an average of 565 new rules each year. In one analysis by the Office of Management and Budget, of the 30 least cost-effective regulations throughout the government, 17 had been imposed by the EPA.
Federal law requires the government to perform a cost-benefit analysis of its rules and projects. Because of this logical requirement, environmental activists were not able to pass many of their desired regulations. Early in the Obama administration, an accounting rule was created defining the "social cost of carbon." An unelected interagency working group decided somehow that every metric ton of carbon that was reduced by the regulation would count for $21 in "social benefits." The figure is a "comprehensive estimate of climate change damages," according to the EPA. This is guesswork at best: guessing about how more carbon in the air might affect the climate, and then guessing how much that miniscule change might harm anything from crop production to health care costs to rising sea levels. Science should be useful in policy making, though it has to make valid predictions. Global warming proponents are befuddled as to why, despite a nearly 10-percent rise in atmospheric carbon over the past 20 years, global average temperature was unchanged in this period. The speculative social cost of carbon was raised several times in a few years, and months before introducing the Clean Power Plan, the EPA suddenly raised the social cost of carbon to $36.
The executive rulemaking may be legal but is highly undemocratic. Congress has never passed a law about the social cost of carbon. You may recall that President Obama couldn't pass his anti-carbon agenda through Congress in his first two years of office, even with a Democratic supermajority. The legal definition of "social cost of carbon" was introduced in 2010, two years after Obama took office.
As an aside, I take note that there is no "social cost of wind power" that takes into account bird kills or farmland conversion, nor is there a "social cost of ethanol" regarding higher food costs.
The Trump administration and specifically the EPA have either already rolled back or are currently working on reforming many costly and dubious regulations: bans on offshore drilling, U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Accord, new greenhouse gas emissions and mileage standards, reforming the Clean Water Rule and the Clean Power Plan, etc. Currently, the EPA is considering changing how it does cost-and-benefit analysis for new regulations. A reform in this area, to ensure regulation is based on sound scientific analysis instead of conjecture and wishful thinking, should be greatly welcomed.
The far left may well be exuberant for the exit of Pruitt. And perhaps he deserved to go, albeit not for policy reasons. Who, however, is Andrew Wheeler?
Not only is he no stranger to the EPA, where he worked for nearly two decades, but during Wheeler's tenure on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, he worked on almost every major environmental and energy-related legislation before Congress. Wheeler also has worked as an energy sector lobbyist, perhaps most notably for Murray Energy Co., one of the nation's largest coal mining companies.
In a recent interview, Wheeler said, "I would say that the agenda for the agency was set out by President Trump. And Administrator Pruitt has been working to implement that. I will try to work to implement the president's agenda as well. I don't think the overall agenda is going to change that much because we're implementing what the president has laid out for the agency. He made several campaign promises that we are working to fulfill here."
One could make the argument that Wheeler is even more skilled as a regulator and will be even more effective than Pruitt in implementing Trump's pro-manufacturing and pro-business policies. I fully expect Wheeler to continue the reformation. Forcing Pruitt out may be a pyrrhic victory for his detractors. Many of the reforms achieved and underway by this administration are solid wins for our industry and the nation's economy.
I hope the information in this issue of BIC will help you earn real wins, both on the job and off. In this issue of BIC, we include insight from Geoff Glasrud, vice president and manufacturing manager of Flint Hills Resources' Pine Bend Refinery; Rodney Greenup, president of Greenup Industries; Spencer Moak, vice president of West Coast operations for Specialty Welding and Turnarounds (SWAT); and Chad Rados, project coordinator for The ALL Family of Companies.
We also feature a wide variety of articles on topics important to your business, including national petrochemical expansion reports, turnaround performance assessments, project controls advancements, OSHA compliance, industrial construction workforce development, a natural gas power generation update, maintenance and reliability enhancement, and safety equipment highlights.
Many of you loyal readers know already that BIC rarely speaks to political parties or specific candidates. We do, however, support policy that fosters our industries and free enterprise in general. In part, we do this through our support of state and national industry associations, such as AFPM, ILTA, TCC, LCA, etc., which also work on policy matters. I hope you, too, will exercise your duties as a citizen to educate yourself on issues closest to you and participate in our democratic process. God bless.