Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry

by Rich Trzupek

Rich Trzupek has spent over 25 years engaged in combat with the environmental movement on the front lines, helping America’s industrial sector defend itself against the increasingly aggressive tactics that environmental advocacy groups and their allies in the Environmental Protection Agency employ. In Regulators Gone Wild Trzupek lays out the inside story that describes the way the green/big government alliance has combined to stifle American productivity and hamstring American innovation, not by design, but as the inevitable consequence of pursuing a utopian vision of environmental purity that can never, ever be realized.

As a respected scientist and consultant, Rich Trzupek has been employed by some of America’s largest corporations and by some of its smallest, most innovative entrepreneurs. Those experiences have provided him with a unique perspective. While many of his colleagues in the industrial consulting community only consider the short-term profit opportunities that an overly aggressive EPA provides them, Trzupek takes a longer view. If the EPA continues to hamstring America’s ability to create wealth, everyone loses.

When it comes to today’s environmental issues, most of the public’s attention is focused on the issue of “climate change” and initiatives to reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. As a climate change skeptic, Trzupek argues against these measures, but he sees the rise of this issue as another inevitable step in a progression that spans four decades during which the green movement has continually sought new ways to control industry and the EPA has always happily obliged them. Attempts to restrict America’s use of cheap, plentiful coal and stop oil exploration are just the latest examples of regulators gone wild.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published June 21, 2011

Reviews

[Ann Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered how bad things have gotten for business, crushed under the weight of mindless regulations, this book is for you. Rich Trzupek has a wonderful way of story-telling, even in this non-fiction, that gets to the core of the issue. Hopefully this book set the stage for changes to come.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tend to stay away from any book with this inflammatory a title, but the fact is its hard to get any semi-objective reports on contemporary environmental policy because everyone conversant with it has such a stake in the game. I knew a little about the subject, and wanted to get an in-depth look at the issue that wouldn't appear in the New York Times.

This is not that. The book is fairly disorganized, and tends toward the anecdotal, and even the anecdotes go back and forth over the last 30-odd years. Still, all that being said, I think the author makes his main points.

First is that the environment IS infinitely better than it was 40 years ago, and that we do have the EPA to thank for this to some large extent. The prevalence of air and water pollutants have all dropped by 50% or more, and the incidents of high ozone, smog, and unsanitary drinking water have dropped drastically. Second, since the regulatory focus has been concentrated on industrial pollution, that is where the greatest drops in emissions have happened. Now less than 25% of Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) come from industrial sources (the rest is from cars, homes, or just natural background "pollution"). For the more dangerous "urban toxics," the number that comes from industry or factories is less than 10%.

The problem is that industry remains the easiest to regulate, so these days achieving ever lower area air pollution standards means that federal and state EPAs keep pushing factories of all sizes to attain pollution levels that even a Honda Civic couldn't make.

The author also shows that since the increasing scrutiny of an ever-decreasing number of industrial sites has become ever more futile, the EPA has transformed from an agency focused on pollution to one focused almost exclusively on paperwork. The examples are infinite.

The author cites a small company in Illinois that made the plastic films that coat price-labels (couldn't get any more innocuous than that). The company dutifully filed its Tier II chemical handler forms, its Form R report, its wastewater report, and countless others, but it didn't know that the EPA a few years before began requiring an "official certification," a meta-form of sorts confirming that all of the other forms had also been filled out. Seems like anbureaucratic oversight, but the EPA fined the company $100,000 for this non-slip of the pen. No pollution problem was actually at stake, as in so many of the cases the author cites it was just a case of completing paperwork. In another case a retiree who invested his life savings in a 6-unit apartment building got sued for $75,000 because he forgot to file a Lead-Based Paint form. There was no lead paint in his building, and no one claimed there was, but the form itself was all that mattered. In a more troubling case, Abbott Labs in Chicago noted on one of its forms that it had added a cleansing solvent to one of its coal boilers. The problem was that the solvent changed the boiler from an "energy" boiler to an "industrial" one, which made it out of compliance with EPA industrial regulations. The agency's response was immediate, the company had to build a dirtier coal boiler, and this was done.

Anyway, there are plenty of other cases here, along with a bunch of irrelevant digressions, but there is a real element of truth in what the author wants to get across. Do we care about the environment, or do we care only about following irrelevant procedures?

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last things we ought to do is hamstring industry with additional complicated regulations that accomplish virtually nothing. Yet there is so much irrational fear among great swathes of the populace that this is exactly what we are doing. The massive bureaucracy that is the EPA feeds on that fear and, in doing so, empowers its regulators to go wild.