U.S. Faces Regulatory Cliff: Looming rules could drive up costs, report says

William Yeatman, an environmental regulation expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said Inhofe’s steep price tag is no exaggeration.

“This has been a very aggressive EPA that has adopted many costly rules,” he said. “These new regulations that are not yet final have the potential to be extremely onerous and extremely expensive.”

[…]

Yeatman, the regulations expert, said it is no accident that the MACT rules were strict enough to bar the use of coal. Many of the EPA’s proposals under the Obama administration have purposely set coal, mercury, and emissions standards “below measurable levels.”

“They are trying to mandate coal emissions at natural gas levels—that’s literally impossible,” he said.

“Boiler MACT is the most stringent, onerous, rigidly uncompromising regulation in the Clean Air Act, and it is evident that Obama’s EPA brazenly punted to 2013 because of where it would hit hardest.”

The EPA’s Jones said the agency’s handling of the MACT rule demonstrated that it “fully considers the economic impacts of regulations.”