Bureaucratic Environmental Protection Agency

The proprietor of Coyote Blog is an entrepreneur specializing in operating camping & recreation facilities. Recently he’s been moving from big pick-up trucks to much smaller, more fuel-efficient, cheaper used Japanese trucks. That is, until the EPA barred their import:

These are trucks that are from an emissions regime (in Japan) harsher than ours and that have three times the gas mileage of the trucks they are replacing. But apparently the EPA doesn’t have rules for them and doesn’t know how to categorize them, and anything a bureaucrat doesn’t have rules for must be illegal, right? So now we are forced to go back to full-size pickup truck purchases until the EPA can catch up with the market.

Your government at work. Causing higher pollution and higher domestic energy usage by banning imports completely until they can fully study the matter — rather than allowing a variance and continuing to import from a more stringent country while doing their study.

But hey, I’m sure Government Motors is happy for the business Coyote might end up sending their way. No conflict of interest there, right?