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Over Half of EPA Inspector General's Credit Card Charges Were 'Improper'

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Photo Credit: Free Enterprise

Photo Credit: Free Enterprise

A review of “high risk” credit card charges by Environmental Protection Agency auditors found that more than half were “improper,” including for police equipment and “novelty items.”

The EPA’s inspector general plucked a few charges out of those made by the office from October 2012 to April 2014 to review. Of the $62,012 charged by workers, $36,488 were improper, according to the review titled, “Spending Taxpayer Dollars: Ineffective Oversight of Purchase Cards Resulted in Improper Purchases at EPA OIG.”

The IG found no illegal purchases, but said that many were made by IG workers who lacked the authority. Several purchases weren’t cleared by bosses, records weren’t retained and in two unidentified cases, sales taxes weren’t recovered; Uncle Sam doesn’t pay taxes.

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EPA Director on Environmental Laws: ‘Enforcement Really is Democracy in Action’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APEPA Director Gina McCarthy has praised environmental lawyers for their work, telling them “enforcement really is democracy in action.”

“When I think about how effective we’ve been I keep coming back to the same reason for that effectiveness, it’s because our laws have teeth, it’s because EPA is empowered to enforce them,” McCarthy told attendees at the American Bar Association Fall Conference.

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'Global Warming Scare' Declared 'Over'

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Photo Credit: WNDScientists and others on a team assembled by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which focuses on free-market solutions to today’s problems, say the “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over.”

It’s “past time” for the world to realize that and “stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat,” contends Kenneth Haapala, the executive vice president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project at the Heartland Institute.

Institute experts said Thursday the Remote Sensing Systems, which provide data to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation, have confirmed “the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years.”

“This extends the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change,” the organization said.

Craig Idso, senior fellow in environment for the Heartland Institute and co-editor of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a counterpart to the IPCC, said that to “the world’s climate alarmists, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a dangerous trace gas, and for years, they have been insisting its increase will raise global temperatures and wreak havoc upon Earth’s climate and biosphere.”

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Senator: Emails Reveal EPA, Green Group in ‘Beyond Cozy’ Relationship

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Photo Credit: Pete Souza / White HouseRepublican lawmakers say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enjoys a “beyond cozy” relationship with a liberal environmental action group that seeks to reshape national energy policies in a way that would hurt American businesses and families.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Daily Signal that the Natural Resources Defense Council played an “absolutely inappropriate” role in drafting the EPA’s new carbon emissions plan.

“The EPA has been one of the least transparent agencies I have ever seen, but it’s become apparent that their lack of transparency is to hide the influence that an organization so heavily focused on undermining U.S. businesses and families has at EPA,” Vitter said.

Vitter and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., have directed staff to look into whether the EPA broke federal law in developing the carbon emissions regulations.

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Union Workers Protest Obama's EPA Regs: 'Don’t Even Mention His Name'

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Photo Credit: APThe United Mine Workers of America held a rally Tuesday in Washington, D.C., to protest Environmental Protection Agency regulations that they claim would destroy the nation’s coal industry and coal-related jobs while doing nothing to address climate change.

On Tuesday, current and retired workers convened at Freedom Plaza, then marched to EPA offices to protest EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, part of President Obama’s larger climate-change agenda, which aims to cut carbon pollution by imposing state-by-state emissions standards and fines for failure to meet those standards.

CNSNews.com asked protesters, “If you could tell President Obama anything about these regulations today, what would you say?”

“Don’t even mention his name,” one protester said. “He’s the one stirring up a lot of the problems we’re having now with these coal-fired plants.”

“I wish [Obama] could walk a day in our shoes, let him come down to the mines and talk to us but I wish he could get down on our level and see what it’s doing to the coal industry, cause it’s sure – he and the EPA industry are sure ruining it,” said another protester.

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Could the EPA Chief Really be ‘Worse than Lois Lerner’?

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Photo Credit: APA new court ruling may force more transparency out of the Environmental Protection Agency.

That’s the hope of Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He points out the EPA has been involved with false identification in e-mail accounts, conducted agency business on private e-mail accounts and is now being held accountable for destroying thousands of public records in the form of text messages.

Horner goes so far as to say EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is “worse than Lois Lerner,” the central figure in the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal.

“I don’t think any agency can compare with this agency,” Horner told TheBlaze, regarding the EPA. “For once, the EPA has been told it cannot do whatever it wants to do under the law. That is news.”

Horner was referring to a federal judge’s ruling Thursday that called it “implausible” that EPA officials could be missing 5,000 text messages from government-issued mobile phones and not suspect the destruction of records. The decision allows a lawsuit to proceed seeking an injunction to prevent further document destruction by the agency.

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EPA Fakes Regulatory Cost-Benefit Calculations

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Photo Credit: NewscomWhen pressed about the staggering increases in regulatory burden under his administration, President Obama says not to worry because the benefits exceed the costs. But a new and revealing set of charts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce highlights the shameless deception used to calculate the bulk of these purported benefits.

In Charting Federal Costs and Benefits, Chamber researchers analyzed the benefits calculations of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for the largest portion of the most costly regulations in recent years. What they found obliterates the president’s claims that sky-high regulatory costs are justified.

Specifically, the researchers reviewed the 45 rules for which the agency calculated benefits between 2000 and 2013. (The fact that the EPA failed to calculate benefits for any of the other 7,570 rules imposed by the agency in that period is another serious problem.) Although the regulations were crafted to address a variety of emissions, including carbon dioxide, lead, mercury and sulfur dioxide, a whopping 97 percent of the benefits actually were derived from the reduction of a single element—fine particulate matter—that was incidental to the pollutant targeted by the regulation.

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Blueprint for Water ‘Control’? Pol Says EPA Made Secret Maps for New Regulatory Push

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Photo Credit: EPA

Photo Credit: EPA

A top House Republican is charging that the Environmental Protection Agency secretly drafted highly detailed maps of U.S. waterways to set the stage for a controversial plan to expand regulatory power over streams and wetlands, a claim the EPA strongly denies.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, released those maps on Wednesday, while firing off a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy voicing concerns over why they were created in the first place.


“These maps show the EPA’s plan: to control a huge amount of private property across the country. Given the astonishing picture they paint, I understand the EPA’s desire to minimize the importance of these maps,” he wrote, in the letter obtained by FoxNews.com.

But an EPA spokeswoman said the maps, from the U.S. Geological Survey and Fish and Wildlife Service, do not depict which waters are subject to EPA control.

“Let us be very clear — these maps have nothing to do with EPA’s proposed rule or any other regulatory purpose,” Liz Purchia said, noting they were initially created years ago and subsequently updated.

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A Humble Coal Miner Delivered Mic-Dropping Testimony at an EPA Hearing That Will Blow You Away

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Photo Credit: Free Enterprise

Photo Credit: Free Enterprise

…After a week of thousands of people giving testimonials, shouting through megaphones, and yelling about how angry they are about the situation, it was one man who gave a soft and emotional speech which stood out above the rest.

Life-long coal miner Walter Parker came to the hearings to testify on behalf of himself and his family. Walter explains that if the EPA takes away his job, the only life he and his family have ever known will be destroyed.

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The Environmental Corruption Agency

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

The lofty motto of the Environmental Protection Agency is “protecting people and the environment.” In practice, however, EPA bureaucrats faithfully protect their own people and preserve the government’s cesspool of manipulation, cover-ups and cronyism.

Just last week, Mark Levin and his vigilant Landmark Legal Foundation went to court to ask federal district judge Royce Lamberth to sanction the EPA “for destroying or failing to preserve emails and text messages that may have helped document suspected agency efforts to influence the 2012 presidential election.” The motion is part of a larger Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to force EPA to release emails and related records from former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and others “who may have delayed the release dates for hot-button environmental regulations until after the Nov. 6, 2012, presidential election.”

Thanks to Levin and Landmark, Jackson and other EPA officials admitted in depositions that they used personal, nongovernmental email accounts to hide communications about official EPA business sent and received on their government-issued BlackBerries and smart phones. The agency has continued to drag its feet for two years in response to Landmark’s FOIA requests.

Levin minced no words: “The EPA is a toxic waste dump for lawlessness and disdain for the Constitution.” Not to mention disdain for the public’s right to know. As Levin added: “When any federal agency receives a FOIA request, the statute says it must preserve every significant repository of records, both paper and electronic, that may contain materials that could be responsive to that request.”

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