Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social
@TrumpDailyPosts
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I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standards and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOILETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these Orders. THANK YOU!!!
2:13 PM · Feb 11, 2025. //

Most of Biden's regulations would do little to lower emissions significantly or affect the vast climate system. They mostly seemed designed to punish the American people, virtue signal, and send billions to the Green New Deal scammers.

BECS are officially referred to as “voluntary,” and supposedly developed by “consensus,” for state and local governments to implement building energy efficiency requirements. The International Code Council (ICC), through its numerous committees, publishes these codes and generates revenues by selling them to whoever needs them (e.g., code officials, builders, trades, etc.). ICC energy codes are organized and managed under a separate division of the ICC called the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). //

“Consensus” building energy codes have been largely and silently commandeered by EERE which has accelerated under the Biden administration. “Consensus” comes through “packing the bleachers” of committees with loyalists to further the Net-Zero concept. Tactics include “improving” building energy efficiency codes through “public/private partnerships.” However, the true cause of Net-Zero policies is to advance electrified “energy efficiency” via “clean” (a.k.a. renewable) energy so that consumers can be more readily controlled. //

RedStorm
9 hours ago
I find energy consumption information useful as a consumer on major appliances, for example. Not that I think I’m ‘saving the planet’ by buying an appliance that uses less energy, but I like knowing relatively what that sucker is going to cost me to operate. Same with mileage information about an automobile. Those are useful regulations, requiring producers to provide information that is of value to consumers. Give me information to make decisions that make sense to me and my lifestyle, don’t restrict my options, let the market take care of that. If only regulators could stay in that lane…

DOT should certainly enforce refunds for services charged but not provided. But they shouldn’t lock airlines and airfare search sites into displaying specific charges in a standardized way, the same everywhere. We should be encouraging competition in meeting consumer needs, not making airline sites and Expedia displays the same forever. It’s not only seat and bag fees that matter – and even those don’t always matter!

But they know no matter what they do, they cannot prevent all seamen deaths. So they must devise a way to show that, when that catastrophe happens, they have done everything they could to prevent it. They require detailed analyses showing that any possible mistake or failure by man or machine will not result in a seaman death.

They require that all vendors go through an expensive and restrictive certification process. The yard is no longer free to bid anyone it wants to. Newcomers need not apply. The incumbent vendors enjoy a deep regulatory moat. Their focus becomes maintaining the paperwork required to preserve that moat. Cost is determined by amount of paperwork not quality.

The OSD writes detailed process requirements dictating just how components will be manufactured and who can do that work. They imposes multiple layers of paperwork documenting that all their procedures have been followed. Any change has to go through a long list of sign offs, requiring reanalysis of anything that might be affected. How long these approvals will take is anybody's guess.

They instruct their inspectors to reject any departure from an approved drawing no matter how trivial or beneficial. If an OSD inspector does not show up for a required test, the test has to wait until he does.

What do you think will happen to our shipyard's productivity? I can tell you what will happen. The carefully choreographed system will be thrown into chaos, and grind to a virtual halt. Cost will increase by an order of magnitude or more. Quality will deteriorate drastically. The ships will be delivered years late. They will rarely perform to spec, some will not perform at all.

Why can I tell you what will happen? US naval shipyards resemble Korean yards on the surface but they are controlled by something that looks very much like the OSD system. In fact, the OSD system is modeled on the Navy system. I spent the first decade or so of my career, working within this system. I saw the focus on process rather than substance. I saw the waste. I saw inexplicable decisions go unchallenged. I saw obvious errors turned into profit centers. I saw promotions based not on output, but on keeping the paperwork clean. I saw horribly bloated initial prices followed by enormous overruns. I saw schedules busted by months and then by years. I saw ships that did not work. I saw everybody involved stridently defend the system.

Thank God the OSD does not run nuclear power. We'd have no chance of solving the Gordian Knot.

It’s conservatives who don’t want the government to restrict our speech or gas-powered vehicles or Covid therapeutics. So why are we up in arms over what, according to the “science,” could be a fairly innocuous synthetic color additive made from petroleum, chemically known as erythrosine?

A better question may be: Why was this chemical with zero nutritional value put in our food in the first place? The artificial food coloring was added to make unhealthy food options attractive to kids. The ingredient is often found alongside sugar in foods such as candy, cereal, and juices. Removing the chemical does not deprive anyone of a positive good. Taste will not be sacrificed, simply one tactic to market junk food to kids. Natural ingredients that lack harmful effects, such as beets, are the alternatives to color foods in other countries where the dye has been banned. //

Furthermore, the debate also highlights the difference between conservatives and libertarians. Conservatives are not opposed to government intervention. We’re opposed to ill-defined government intervention, wielded by an unelected bureaucracy captured by corporations, that lacks the support of those who are supposed to have the ultimate say: we the people.

Newsom announced an executive order that he says will help the destroyed areas recover.

“I’m worried about issues of rebuilding as it relates to scarcity, as it relates to property taxes, meaning scarcity of resources, materials, personnel. I’m worried about time to getting these projects done,” Newsom said in an interview with NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff on “Meet the Press.”

Included in the executive order are actions halting environmental regulation in relation “to projects to repair, restore, demolish, or replace property or facilities substantially damaged or destroyed as a result of this emergency” and targeting price gouging. //

anon-mdjj
5 hours ago
That’s all well and good until the Sierra Club ties it all up in court.

Claudius54 anon-mdjj
4 hours ago edited
... and the Kali judges and court system have been rigged for decades toward the very "environmental stewardship", regulation, gas appliance bans, hazardous materials handling restrictions, insurance 'controls', construction restrictions, diversity rules, etc., etc., that will fully constipate any sort of recovery efforts for the foreseeable future. Good luck eluding that reality with a "pen and a phone".

"What you want is irrelevant, what you have chosen is at hand."
-Spock

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving forward with a regulatory rule in the final days of the Biden administration that would effectively ban cigarettes currently on the market in favor of products with lower nicotine levels, which could end up boosting business for cartels operating on the black market, an expert tells Fox News Digital. //

It's not a done deal yet; the rule has yet to be finalized. Fortunately, there is a process for these things, and this one is still in the works — and, presumably, open for a new presidential administration to point out that this doesn't pass the stupid test. //

The Biden administration appears to have learned nothing from Prohibition, or any other time the federal government has tried this kind of heavy-handed approach. The Mexican cartels, when they learn of this, will be rubbing their hands together in glee; another billion-dollar black market will soon be opening up, courtesy of the Biden administration, complete with turf wars and all that goes with it. //

anon-hllt
4 hours ago
This a plot. A plot for us smokers to smoke more to cope with lowered nicotine, and thus to pay even more taxes. It’s a hike of the sin tax clothed in another “see how the government cares about you?” lie. It will backfire spectacularly, just like everything else this administration has done under the guise of “caring.”. //

Watt stickdude90
5 hours ago
The process appears to have started during the first Trump administration.

https://natlawreview.com/article/ctp-advances-proposal-set-maximum-nicotine-level-cigarettes

Appalachian Liberty
@Liberty_Xtreme
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A group of coal miners from West Virginia have finished building a road from Big Chimney in under a week.

A road that North Carolina Government Officials said would take several months to a year for them to do. #appalachianstrong
4:45 AM · Oct 26, 2024. //

Men doing the work. Celebrities doing the complaining. The contrast cannot be clearer. I admit that I don’t know the politics of those West Virginians, and I don’t know who they are voting for president, but I think I can make an educated guess. Is there any doubt that an EPA hack will step in soon and demand that the Big Chimney terrain be returned to a mass of boulders because the coal miners didn't pull permits and didn't get an environmental study? //

NavyVet Blue State Deplorable
7 hours ago
I don't think EPA will try to do anything; they see the Trump Train a'coming down the track, so they are too busy scrambling and trying to burrow in somewhere. The last thing they want to do is make public asses of themselves right now.

European Union regulators warned Elon Musk's X platform that it may calculate fines by including revenue from Musk's other companies, including SpaceX, according to a Bloomberg article published today.

X was previously accused of violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. That fine would be levied on the "provider" of X, which could be defined to include other Musk-led firms. //

Bloomberg's report says that Tesla "sales would be exempt from this calculation because it's publicly traded and not under Musk's full control."

"In considering revenue from his other companies, the commission is essentially weighing whether Musk himself should be regarded as the entity to fine as opposed to X itself," Bloomberg's sources say.

He even takes the step that I rarely see from even the most reasonable of “reasonable” nuclear critics and concedes that “nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce.” He concedes so much that I’m not always entirely sure what it is we’re disagreeing about.

But a big part of the difference, I think, is probably that Noah lives in California and hangs out with a lot of tech/engineering types for whom all the points about nuclear that he’s conceded are conventional wisdom, and he’s annoyed that a lot of these people have an image of solar (and especially batteries) that’s stuck in the 1980s, rather than seeing these as dynamic, forward-thinking economic sectors. I live in DC, and I hang out with lots of people who work in or adjacent to Democratic Party politics. And among the people I know, the conventional wisdom is toward much too much complacency about the current state of renewables. Many people think that because photovoltaic panels are now cheap, all the problems are solved and the big issue is that you need to say you’re pro-fracking to win Pennsylvania, and they’re looking for linguistics gurus to help them defeat fossil fuel propaganda.

I think that this is all wrong, that the world will remain much more dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future than a lot of progressives want to admit, that there are a bunch of difficult and outstanding problems that need to be solved, and that nuclear policy may provide important solutions to some of those problems. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly what the future of any technology may hold. But I think nuclear fission remains extremely promising if — and it’s a big if — we change Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules to allow for more innovation.

In 1971, the AEC proposed a radically new regulatory philosophy requiring all nuclear plants be designed to hold all radioactive emissions to levels such that "exposures were as low as practicable". In other words, there is no limit. And the criteria is not whether the benefit of further reduction outweighs the cost. The criteria is: can you afford the reduction?

This was such a departure from standard regulation that, despite their desperation to get plants on line, it did produce push back from industry. But after considerable debate the policy was formally adopted in 1975 with the wording changed slightly to "as low as reasonably achievable" or ALARA.

In practice, As Low As Reasonably Achievable is interpreted by the regulators to mandate any regulation that allows nuclear to remain competitive with alternate sources of power.

The current political climate features two sides: Those who want the government to do more for the people and those who want the government to get out of people's way. It's not necessarily a partisan issue, mind you, as there is an alarming number of folks on the right who believe that Republicans should implement more government but just wield it in a conservative way.

Whatever that means. //

We need only look at government-run programs as they exist now, because they are the best arguments against themselves.

With resounding bipartisan, bicameral support that also achieved enthusiastic support of the Executive Branch, the US has enacted a new law announcing its support of nuclear energy. It has the potential to make an even larger impact on global atomic energy use than the combination of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program of international nuclear energy expansion.

Seventy years ago, that earlier combination of law and policy partially removed the blanket of tight security that had locked up fission energy in the years immediately following WWII. President Eisenhower’s clearly stated goal in enabling commercial atomic energy was to develop “the greatest of destructive forces” into a “great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.”

The “great boon” produced a wave of nuclear power plants that now produce the energy equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production. That energy comes at a low marginal cost without air pollution or greenhouse gases, but nuclear power’s contribution to world energy production leveled off at roughly 2600 TWh/yr 20 years ago.

A growing fraction of the world’s science, engineering, environmental and political leaders agree that the situation needs to be changed. In November 2023, the United States led a coalition of two dozen nations in a promise to take action to triple world nuclear energy production by 2050.

Even before the U.S. signed that declaration of intent, House and Senate Republicans and Democrats began holding hearings, listening to constituents, debating with colleagues and engaging in what used to be considered the normal order of business to produce the ADVANCE Act of 2024. ///

Does this change anything about ALARA or LNT guiding regulations? Then I don't see it as anything more than a response to strong criticism of both. Changing the "mission" of the NRC without changing either of those is just more of the same, just "better". Which is not better for energy availability.

The mission of the NRC is still "avoid accidents", not balancing the tradeoff of "energy is dangerous, lets make sure its both available and safe."

The problem is out of control. No one knows how many separate crimes there are, including the Department of Justice. Researchers have tried counting, with one 2019 effort identifying at least 5,199 statutory crimes. Regulatory crimes are orders of magnitude greater, with estimates of the number of regulatory crimes ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 separate offenses.

This is inconsistent with basic ideas of self-government and the intentions of those who framed the Constitution. Laws with criminal consequences should be carefully considered by the legislative branch, not pushed through by unelected bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people. //

Congress can seize the opportunity and pass some simple and commonsense reforms that would further reduce the power of the administrative state and its appetite for passing criminal laws.

Congress should begin by requiring the executive agencies to simply catalog their regulations that have criminal consequences. After all, if a federal agency does not know if something is a criminal offense, how can the people be expected to? If a “mens rea” requirement is not already in the law, Congress should make all criminal regulations have a “willful” requirement to prevent citizens from being prosecuted for actions they did not even know they took. For new laws, agencies should be required to state the applicable mental state.

The Electricity Sector of Liberia has been characterized by monopoly of generation, transmission, and distribution services, and there has also been a fusion of roles, where policy, regulation and operation were combined.

Regulatory functions of the energy sector were relegated to the Ministry of Lands, Mines and Energy (MLME), Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MoCI), Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC), Rural and Renewable Energy Agency (RREA), Liberia Petroleum Refining Company (LPRC), National Oil Company of Liberia (NOCAL), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). State-owned operators including the LEC and micro-utilities have been self-regulating. The result has been high electricity cost and inadequate services, which are major constraints to Liberia’s economic growth and poverty reduction.

To address the situation, the National Energy Policy (NEP) of Liberia was approved in 2009. It provides among others, liberalization of the sector and separation of policy, regulation, and operation.

The National Energy Policy led to the enactment of the 2015 Electricity Law of Liberia (ELL) on October 26, 2015. The ELL provides the legal basis for the establishment of the Liberia Electricity Regulatory Commission (LERC) as the National Regulator. LERC is an independent agency with respect to its budget, management, staffing and the exercise of its duties and authorities as prescribed in Section 13.3 of the Law.

LERC’s function, as regulator, is to issue licenses, approve tariffs, ensure liberalization of the sector, improve service delivery, protect consumers and create a vibrant electricity sector.

Courts no longer owe deference to an administrative agency's interpretation of its ambiguous statutory mandate. //

The Court held that the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs the operations of administrative agencies,

requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.

Thomas agreed with the Court’s decision but wrote separately “to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference violates our Constitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explained at length.”

The violation, Thomas elaborated, stemmed from Chevron‘s mandate that judges surrender their judicial responsibility “to exercise . . . independent judgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.” //

The challengers also argued that Chevron is an abdication of judicial responsibility because courts have the duty to interpret the law, but Chevron deference substitutes the agency’s interpretation. The challengers criticized Chevron for “upend[ing] basic principles of constitutional due process of law” because it required deference to an agency’s interpretation when that agency is a litigant before the court. //

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | June 28, 2024 at 1:04 pm

Chevron is overruled.

Most important decision in decades … 4 decades, precisely.

And courts in the future need to keep in mind, in addition to this, that Congress is disallowed from delegating any of its Constitutional authority to any other entity unless specifically allowed to do so in the Constitution. To do so is to, de facto, amend the Constitution.

The past week has been the legal equivalent of the firebombing of Dresden for the administrative state.

In short order, many of the reasons we gradually, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, transformed from citizens into subjects have been demolished.

In the 6-3 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Chevron "defies the command of" the Administrative Procedure Act (the law governing federal administrative agencies) "that the reviewing court--not the agency whose action it reviews--is to decide all relevant questions of law and interpret ... statutory provisions. It requires a court to ignore, not follow, the reading the court would have reached had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA."

Roberts noted: "Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’s presumption" (that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations of authority by Congress to federal agencies) "is misguided, because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do."

Roberts added that this decision does "not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful--including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself--are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology." //

Jman98 Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
Congress always had the power, they simply refused to use it. Congress could have always been specific in the language used in any given piece of legislation they wrote and passed. They purposely weren’t because specificity leads to responsibility and they’re not about that. By leaving things to someone else, bureaucrats in the Executive branch, they could then complain about how their purposely ambiguous legislation was badly implemented and dodge responsibility for what they’d done. How many times have they written in legislation “the Secretary shall” so as to punt all responsibility for what happens next? Hundreds, sometimes in the same piece of legislation. This is telling Congress to do their job right the first time. //

Minister of War Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
I agree that the power should be returned to the people & their elected representatives. But Iam hesitant when I hear that the Court thinks that courts know better than anyone else. The SCOTUS may have just granted itself & the rest of the judiciary more power that they shouldn't have to do what amounts to writing laws.

Laocoön of Troy Minister of War
an hour ago
No...they've just thrown down the gauntlet and have warned the Executive to not play so fast and loose with regulation or the courts will take away even more power from them. This entire decision is an unmitigated, magnificent result.

I suspect that the lazy and cowardly Congress will end up forced by their donors and political supporters to stop at least some regulation overreach.

While American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have used all their lobbying might to try to get the federal government to shut down competitor JSX - because JSX offers a product that consumers prefer to their own - the origin of the fight against JSX stems from the big pilot union. And it wasn't even JSX they were really concerned with. //

That triggered the Air Line Pilots Association, which fought hard to make it more expensive and take longer to become a pilot. They didn’t want an expansion of flying outside of rules meant to limit the supply of pilots.

To go after SkyWest Charter – which fully complies with current rules, but DOT has simply sat on the application for no valid reason – they had to go after JSX which is a bigger scheduled charter operation. There are others, like Contour, but they saw the space growing.

Once the union started going after Dallas-based JSX, they were able to get Dallas-based Southwest Airlines and American Airlines on board for the fight. //

Nonetheless, the FAA plans to issue regulations cracking down on part 135 carriers and then investigate whether there are actual safety issues. This is a solution in search of a problem, because no one wants to talk about the real reason lobbyists have been pushing this.

There is simply no legitimate safety concern with JSX operations.

So Constable built the fence and consulted with his neighbor, artist Hanif Panni, to paint a photorealistic mural of his ship on the fence that would visually look like the boat. //

Jenn Cheng @THATJennCheng
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Replying to @nettermike
A beautiful example of malicious compliance. This guy seems like someone we'd get along with!
4:02 PM · May 10, 2024