EPA gave taxpayer dollars to Interpol to help their cap and trade market, has given millions to others outside the US

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"EPA is helping bolster a program in Europe that Congress refused to approve for America."...

6/9/11, "Grant mischief at Obama's Employment Prevention Agency," Washington Examiner Editorial

"Officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency annually dole out billions of tax dollars in the form of research grants, payments for program services and products, and funding of litigation. As The Washington Examiner detailed last September in its special report on Big Green environmentalism, hundreds of millions of those tax dollars annually end up in the coffers of major nonprofit activist groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Defenders of Wildlife for programs and advocacy. These groups then advance assist EPA's regulatory initiatives, public relations efforts, congressional lobbying, and legal positions in state and federal courts.

Less well-known is the fact that EPA sends lots of tax dollars overseas as well. According to the agency's grant database on its website, at least 320 overseas EPA grants worth more than $99 million have been approved in the past decade. More than a few of these grants to foreign governments and interests ought to raise congressional eyebrows. For example, during the Bush administration, EPA wrote a check for $100,000 to the Chinese government's State Environment Protection Agency "to implement a more economically efficient environmental management policy for China's industrial sector, focusing on preventing pollution (source reduction) as a preferred approach to environmental management." We can't wait to read the after-action reports describing exactly how that grant money was spent by the Chinese government and what concrete benefits can be shown to have '

• resulted for the American people.

Then there's the $191,638 EPA gave in 2010 for the Gaia Association in Ethiopia to "help 85,000 Ethiopians adopt clean cooking technology [the CleanCook Stove] fueled by clean fuel [ethanol] that will improve their health, protect the environment, and increase their savings." In addition to selected families in Addis Ababa, the stoves are used in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Somalia. That's a good thing, but some might wonder why EPA, rather than the State Department, is giving U.S. tax dollars to an Ethiopian nongovernmental organization named after a Greek goddess and often associated with various New Age religious groups in America and Europe.

Even more puzzling is the $150,000 EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance gave last year to Interpol, described by the agency as an "international criminal police organization." As the Heritage Foundation's Robert Gordon notes, EPA describes the grant's purpose in part as "support of a climate change project which will ensure that markets operate properly, and that fraud is detected promptly with regard to carbon trading. ..." Translated, EPA is giving federal funds to Interpol to help it investigate the massive fraud that has plagued the European cap-and-trade program, including most recently the digital theft of $70 million in carbon credits. Some might ask why EPA is helping bolster a program in Europe that

• Congress refused to approve for America."

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