Good series this week in The Washington Examiner by Kathleen Hartnett White, the former chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and Mario Loyola of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on the anti-Texas campaign of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last July, EPA invalidated the successful 16-year old Texas Flexible Permitting Program, under which emissions have been reduced even as energy production and economic growth continued.

  • Wednesday: “EPA is offended by Texas’ successful permit rules”
  • Thursday: “Putting a lid on Texas’ economic growth“
  • Friday: “EPA doing environmentalists’ dirty work“

The series also notes Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s vigorous resistance to the EPA’s attempt to control economic activity in the nation by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. In an Aug. 2 letter to EPA Administrator Jackson, Abbot and Brian Shaw, chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, wrote: “On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring, or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The best paragraph:

In order to avoid the absurd results of EPA’s own creation, you have developed a “tailoring rule” in which you have substituted your own judgment for Congress’s as to how deep and wide to spread the permitting burden. Notably absent from your rules is any evidence that they would achieve specific results; in fact, you assiduously (and correctly) avoid ascribing what environmental benefit may be achieved by mandating permits to emit a uniformly distributed, trace constituent of clean air, vital to all life, that is emitted by all productive activities on Earth.

Texas is challenging the EPA’s endangerment ruling in federal court.

More coverage …

And in related reporting, “CNBC’s Top States For Business 2010—And The Winner Is Texas“