The Obama administration
is just weeks away from imposing a new ozone particulate standard that
manufacturers say will cripple jobs and productivity in the U.S. and leave some
firms and industries clinging to life.
The National Association
of Manufacturers released a study suggesting the
standard would cost the U.S. 1.4 million jobs and $1.7 trillion in productivity
by 2040 if the standard is lowered from 75 parts per billion to 65 parts per
billion. The EPA could bring it as low as 60 parts per billion, which the study
projects would be catastrophic.
For business owners like
Summitville Tiles CEO David Johnson, the change would be devastating. The firm
is based in Ohio, which relies heavily on manufacturing for jobs and economic
growth. Johnson recently wrote a column explaining what’s at
stake if the Obama administration gets its way.
“We have 88 counties in
this state and under this new ozone standard, all 88 of these counties would be
out of compliance, just by the stroke of the pen of this executive order of the
president,” Johnson said.
In addition to burdening
existing manufacturers, Johnson said the new ozone standard would stifle new
business.
“It would essentially stop
any new projects from going forward unless there were reductions in emissions
in other plants in other areas,” he said. “In other words, there’s a trade-off.
If you’re going to add new emissions, you’d have to reduce emissions somewhere
else. So (if you) shut down a factory or a company goes out of business, then
and only then would you have a permit to expand your particular operations.”
According to
Johnson, American manufacturing has never received a gut punch like this
from its own government.
“This is not a bill that’s
been passed by Congress, hasn’t been vetted, hasn’t been studied,” Johnson
said. “It’s simply President Obama and his EPA’s effort to combat what they
believe is global warming. So yeah, it would be the most expensive regulation in
the history of regulations.”
Economically Crippling
America’s manufacturing base is literally
under siege by federal, state and local regulators. A recent study commissioned
by the National Manufacturer’s Association, in fact, reports that some 2,183
new regulations have been imposed upon the US manufacturing sector since 1981,
mostly from the EPA, costing American manufacturers upwards of $700 billion per
year. Stop for just a minute and think about what this costs. It is staggering.
The Obama Administration’s call for a new,
massively expensive ozone standard will not only be additive to this burden,
but will be the single most expensive regulation ever imposed
upon American manufacturers, estimated to cost the nation 1.4 million jobs and
$1.7 trillion in lost productivity by 2040.
This new ozone standard, slated to go into
effect in less than 90 days, will slam existing manufacturers with new
“maintenance costs” that could jeopardize the very viability of an enterprise.
Plants located in what the EPA calls “non-attainment” zones will not be able to
expand without: A) a reduction in emissions; or B) the shutdown of operations
from other plants in a given area. Plans for new plants and/or the expansion of
existing plants will just be shelved.
In Ohio, this new ozone standard would
unilaterally and immediately place every single county in the state in a
“non-attainment” zone. By lowering the permissible ozone particulate from 75 to
65 parts per billion (ppb), the state’s entire manufacturing base will be
subject to massive re-regulation, stifling new regulatory rules, and staggering
new costs of compliance.
Meanwhile, by the EPA’s own public
admission, concentrations of ozone have actually declined by 33% from 1980 to
2013, even as the US population has increased by almost 40% over that period of
time and the US economy more than doubled in size just since 1990. Why the
urgent need now, then, to impose such a draconian new regulatory scheme? This
makes no economic sense…nor even any environmental sense… whatsoever.
As the CEO of a fourth generation,
family-owned clay products manufacturing company in Appalachian Ohio, I wonder
how we will survive this. A little more than a decade ago, this company
employed over 700 employees at three tile manufacturing facilities, a clay
mining operation, a cement mixing plant and sixteen tile distribution centers
across the US. Today we are a mere fraction of this size but remain the best at
what we manufacture.
Facing an onslaught of low-cost imports
pouring into the US from all over the world, most particularly from the very
Pacific-rim nations with which the Obama Administration now proposes to enter
into a new “sweet heart” trade agreement, much of the US ceramic tile industry
has already been wiped out by the dual whammy of globalization and over-zealous
regulation. In fact, we are the only charter member of the
ceramic tile industry’s national trade association, the Tile Council of North
America, to remain in business.
What is most shocking of all is that this
new regulatory assault coming from Washington seems almost deliberately
designed to hammer companies that are already struggling. How can we even look
our employees in the eye and say that our (and their) future looks bright? Ever
the optimist, my prayer is that the leadership of this nation will come to
their senses on this ozone matter before irreparable damage is done.
Ozone – O3
Colorless (or faintly blue), unstable (reactive), and water
soluble gas having chlorine-like odor, and formed in the upper atmosphere by the action of solar radiation on oxygen.
Its presence as a layer in stratosphere serves as a screen (called ozone shield) to block
harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the earth's surface. At ground level it
is formed by the combination of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides in
the presence of sunlight and is the main ingredient of smog. In
high-enough concentrations it can
reduce lung function, inflame
lung tissue, and cause coughing, shortness of breath, and other respiratory problems. Excessive
exposure can result in
permanent lung damage. Used
commercially for bleaching, deodorizing, and disinfecting. Also called
iriatomic oxygen or trioxygen. See also ozone layer.
Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/ozone-O3.html#ixzz3mTsObB4l
Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/ozone-O3.html#ixzz3mTsObB4l
Comments
We need to impeach Obama and reverse EPA overreach.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment