New EPA Regs Issued Under Obama Are 43 Times as Long as Bible

Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 3,120 new final regulations, equaling 27,854 pages in the Federal Register, totaling approximately 27,854,000 words.

Using the Regulations.gov website and data from the Federal Register, CNSNews.com found 3,120 final rules published by the EPA since January 2009 covering  greenhouse gases, air quality, emissions, and hazardous substances, to name a few. The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules but the CNSNews.com tabulation included only the final rules from the EPA.

For comparison with those final rules, the Gutenberg Bible is 1,282 pageslong and contains 646,128 words.This means that the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration now contain 21 times as many pages as the Bible and 43 times as many words.

Also, the EPA regulations have 25 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series, which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words.

One volume of the Gutenberg Bible, which was published as a two-volume set in 1455.

To get an approximate word count for each EPA rule in the Federal Register, CNSNews.com evaluated a few random rules from the 3,120 EPA regulations published since Obama took office, and calculated an approximate average of 1,000 words per page. From this, CNSNews.com calculated that the 3,120 final EPA rules that have been published in the Federal Register so far take up 27,854,000 words.

This is only an approximation because some pages in the Federal Register carry more words than others, and some regulations end in the beginning or middle of a page. For example, one of the regulations was five-pages long and totaled 5,586 words, an average of 1,117 words per page.

Another regulation was three-pages long and 3,150 words, which averaged to 1,050 words per page. Another rule was four-pages long and 4,426 words, or an average 1,106 words per page.

The 7 volumes of the Harry Potter book series. (AP)

“The broader question of whether the Obama Administration’s EPA is ‘overreaching’ in its regulatory effects has not gone away. Critics both in Congress and outside of it regularly accuse the agency of overkill,” states a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, EPA Regulations: Too Much, Too Little, or On Track?

“EPA’s actions, both individually and in sum, have generated controversy,” the CRS report states. “Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have expressed concerns, through bipartisan letters commenting on proposed regulations and through introduced legislation that would delay, limit, or prevent certain EPA actions.”

Yet, EPA proponents are fighting for more rules. “Environmental groups and other supporters of the agency disagree that EPA has overreached,” said CRS. “Many of them believe that the agency is, in fact, moving in the right direction, including taking action on significant issues that had been long delayed or ignored in the past. In several cases, environmental advocates would like the regulatory actions to be stronger.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/new-epa-regs-issued-under-obama-are-43-times-long-bible