Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

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The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That's why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

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Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.