For all of the conspiracy enthusiasts reading this, the EPA did finally release their agenda for 2012 – but not until late in the day on the Friday before Christmas and there was no press release sent out. One might think the release of the agenda would be a pretty big deal. On the EPA home page, they have rotating news items they think the public would be most interested in reading. In that space they have a story about Radon month, soot regulations, they continue to attack the car industry with their fuel economy guidelines, and they have a feature on how to properly set a fire.

The agency has a page set aside just to list all of the regulatory agendas that have been published. The newest edition is not there. I went to the newsroom page and searched through the news releases. It is not there.

However, I did notice a news item that I had previously missed. Industry and associations have been waiting for the final version of the popularly noted Boiler MACT rule. That same Friday before Christmas, they released the following, EPA Finalizes Clean Air Standards for Industrial Boilers, Incinerators and Cement Kilns/Updated rules provide extensive public health protections, cut costs of compliance.

I will keep looking for the regulatory agenda and will post the URL for it on our social media pages for our followers once I find it. According to a story on the Fox News website, the EPA is estimating that the cost of the new requirements for boiler emission control would run somewhere between $53 million and $350 million. To me, that is a very large range. The EPA further said that court ordered changes actually lowered compliance costs by $1.5 billion and that most boilers would be able to comply through routine maintenance.

According to the American Action Forum, the regulations passed in 2012 would total more than $241 billion in compliance costs to industry and require 156.4 million hours per year in paperwork preparation. The EPA requirements alone add $123 billion in compliance costs and it will take an additional 13 million man hours per year to fill out the paperwork.