Monday, October 18, 2010

Is the EPA Trying to Murder the USA?

By Alan Caruba

Day after day the news arrives regarding some new announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that is often so bizarre that it seems a parody of regulation, science, and common sense.

Most people don’t have time to pay attention to the cast of characters setting the agency’s agenda but these days that includes the president’s top environment advisor, Carol Browner, a former EPA director under Bill Clinton, and Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, an acolyte of Browner and, if possible, more obsessed with destroying the nation than her former boss.

Browner is a dedicated Socialist, but Jackson is a bounce-off-the-walls enviro-wacko for whom real science is a great nuisance while pseudo-science is a blunt instrument with which to impose a regime that will destroy the economy and take down the whole nation.

At the heart of the EPA’s latest initiatives is the thoroughly debunked theory of “global warming”; that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “causing” it, and that human beings are producing too much CO2 by using various forms of energy such as coal, oil, and natural gas. All three assertions are utterly and completely false.

As you read this, the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, 0.91% argon, and 0.0389% carbon dioxide. Of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, the largest is water vapor—clouds.

When the EPA recently announced it had lifted the cap on how much ethanol had to be mixed with gasoline to increase the consumption mandates in the 2007 energy bill from 10% to 15%, it set off a firestorm of resistance. At the last count, more than 90 companies and trade associations have filed legal challenges.

The ethanol mandate was and is bogus. When mixed with gasoline, ethanol actually produces more CO2. It reduces the mileage per gallon and, in the process, damages automobile engines because it is corrosive. Made primarily from corn, it drives up the cost of countless food products. Its use is solely dependent on government mandates and subsidies. It is moonshine.

While companies and jobs depart the United States, the government flushes billions down the green toilet subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar energy.

The EPA has been asserting the right to regulate CO2, claiming that the 1970 Clean Air Act permits this. It does not.

When the State of Texas protested, The Wall Street Journal noted that Ms. Jackson was “threatening to punish Texas and other green dissenters with a de facto moratorium on any major energy or construction projects.” The Obama EPA is not run by touchy-feely tree huggers. “Put bluntly,” said the Journal, “this coercion is illegal.”

In an October 10 editorial, the Journal warned, “the EPA decision to strip permitting authority from the states is tantamount to a ban on major construction or building expansion—not merely Texan refineries, but any kind of carbon-heavy utility, industrial production, manufacturing plant or even large office buildings.”

The authority it claims would enable the EPA to shut down every kind of industrial activity or construction project nationwide.

We have witnessed the damage the Obama administration’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has wrought. Despite two court rulings that it was illegal, the administration ignored them and, only when it concluded that the moratorium might cost Democrats votes in the midterm elections, was it lifted.

This is the most anti-energy administration in the nation’s history and it poses a grave threat to the economy.

CNSnews.com reported on a June 3 EPA statement, noting that “Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions will ‘slow construction nationwide for years’—but will only reduce global temperatures 0.0015 (15 ten-thousandths) of a degree Celsius in the next century.”

Mother Nature is already reducing worldwide temperatures as the result of a natural cooling cycle that began around 1998. We are more than a decade into a cycle that some meteorologists fear could become a new Little Ice Age.

A GOP minority report on the EPA’s greenhouse gas emission reduction proposals estimated than more than 800,000 jobs would be put at risk with no evidence of any environmental benefit.

In January, the EPA proposed lowering the ozone national ambient air quality standards from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to between 60 and 70 ppb. A study by the Manufacturer’s Alliance/MAPI declared that the EPA’s proposed revision of the “primary” (health based) standard would have “devastating economic impacts.”

The study estimated the new ozone standard would impose compliance costs of $1.013 trillion between 2020 and 2030 with a resulting reduction of GDP of $687 billion by 2020. They estimate 7.3 million jobs would be lost by 2020.

Ozone and carbon dioxide levels, and even levels of airborne dust are the Trojan horse the EPA is using to wreak havoc on an already fragile economy and rising levels of unemployment.

If the EPA is permitted to have its way, in ten years the economy will have been effectively destroyed. This all-encompassing federal agency gives daily evidence of trying to murder the United States of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

11 comments:

LarryOldtimer said...

Our economy has already been mostly destroyed by the EPA, and a huge amount of existing legislation must be done away with if we are to survive as a nation.

What we have now for government is very close to the German Wiemar Republic formed in 1919, which led to a complete disaster for Germany.

Anonymous said...

StWe have our very own version of the nonsense you describe, Alan.
England's very own Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, is hewn from the self same brown substance and an off-the-wall bubble head, 100% committed greenie.

He has just won for his department One Billion Pounds Sterling
(1,000,000,000 in Imperial terms) for CCS development. Also 'won' is a 10% increase for nuclear DE-commissioning, Sterling 400m for proposed renewable energy small scale projects, Sterling 60m for ports handling windmill blades. And so the lunacy goes on.

This money into a useless black hole, the loss of which is going to kill people - for instance,it could pay for the heating bills for 2million pensioners in the furious northern winter; 100,000 lost heart operations; 150,000 hip replacements (H/T Richard North).

By 2020 our gov. wants offshore wind farms to total 33GW (1 gigawatt = 1,000 megawatts). At Sterling 3M / MW this computes to Sterling 100Bn (100,000,000,000) an absolutely inconcievable amount and in the realm of Barbarella fantasy.

The project itself, even if it were physically possible to build it would only produce something less than a quarter of it nameplate capacity.

The whole mindset is utterly mad and unrealistic as both sides of the Atlantic are in the grip of paranoid lunatics.

LarryOldtimer said...

The EPA has, almost.

cmblake6 said...

The EPA is but another tool being used by Osama, er, bama and the radical left to destroy this nation. If he can't do it legislatively, he/they will use such as this.

2 weeks.

Alan Caruba said...

@Clive: You Brits have to start marching in the streets to stop this madness or there will be a lot fewer of you.

Meteorological forecasts are for some long, cold, fierce winters ahead.

Pat Moffitt said...

EPA is doing what is was designed to do. Prevent things. It resulted from the First Earth day organized by a philosophy that claims pollution and human misery are the result of "excess" economic activity. EPA is doing what it has always done-- some are just now noticing -but it is simply the result of 40 years of accumulated power-- unrestrained.

TexasFred said...

Back in the 80's I lived in El Paso Texas for 9 years...

The EPA took El Paso to task over air quality in the city, and it WAS a pathetic atmosphere, a brown cloud hung over El Paso all the time...

The EPA threatened all kinds of BS sanctions and fines, and then the results of their *study* came in...

The pollution was coming from Juarez...

EPIC FAIL...

kbp said...

"... theory of “global warming”; that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “causing” it, and that human beings are producing too much CO2 by using various forms of energy such as coal, oil, and natural gas. All three assertions are utterly and completely false."

I'm a skeptic / denier or whatever any may call those who do not believe all the doom forecast by IPCC, but I'm without the knowledge necessary to argue support for what you appear to state as fact there.

Alan Caruba said...

@kkp: Data on the climategate scam and the science of meteorology regarding the atmosphere exists in huge amounts.

Check out my list of favorite site links and go to ClimateFraudDispatch, Climate Depot, Climate Realist, IceAgeNow, and IceCap.

After that, you will know all you need.

Guy in Ohio said...

There's a hotel somewhere in Indiana that didn't get my business last night, thanks to the EPA. I wanted to stop and get a room, but drove on home .... no sense in taking a chance with those pesky bed bugs ...

kbp said...

I appreciate the response.

One must be careful as to what they state as fact.

I do not know of any evidence showing the temperatures haven't gone up a little over the last century, but even I dispute the claims of how much they have and what the causes may be.