Pig-Headed EPA Proceeds with Power Grab

Last Thursday, the evil EPA rejected the petitions of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nine other petitioners and announced that it intends to proceed with the development of regulations to control CO2 emissions based on claims by the UN IPCC that they are dangerous to the public health and the environment.  As regular readers of this blog know, this is a perfectly unproven claim and even a known false claim.

The court order that the EPA was following to produce an evaluation of whether man's CO2 emissions were a "public endangerment" under the Clean Air Act required it to examine the science on the issue of catastrophic man-made global warming and make a determination on public endangerment.  Instead, the EPA turned to the now discredited UN IPCC reports and used them as its authority on the science.  The UN IPCC, however, is a political body of nation states and not a scientific institution.  It is not qualified to make such a determination.  The EPA also claimed the scientific backing of the National Academy of Sciences, but that organization has never made any comprehensive assessment of the causes of global climate change, though it has made pronouncements on the issue.  The EPA thus failed to accomplish its court-chartered task.

The legislative Cap and Trade approach to taxing energy and mandating energy use reductions, has run into a roadblock due to the upcoming elections and its lack of support from the People in these difficult recessionary times.  The EPA will now proceed with draconian regulations on CO2 emissions which will not in fact be compatible with the Clean Air Act.  If the courts refuse to recognize the violation of the Clean Air Act and the implied usurpation of power from Congress by the EPA, then the 2011 Congress will have to defund the EPA so it is unable to enforce whatever regulations on CO2 emissions it produces.  Obama and a Democrat Senate will not be able to prevent this defunding of the EPA.  If this is not done, the EPA regulations will greatly extend the recession.  In fact, coupled with the end of the Bush tax cuts, the moratorium on deep water drilling, and ObamaCare costs, these anti-CO2 emissions regulations may convert the recession into a depression.  Even before the regulations are in hand, the uncertainty of their effects will slow down any possible recovery and any hiring.

Uncertainty is the chief enemy of business.  Uncertainty is a form of lawlessness in and of itself.  It was never just the destruction that Attila the Hun did when he swept through a village, but it was the uncertainty caused by the fact that he might do so, which made life nasty and brutish in Eastern Europe during his time.  Obama and his Democrat followers, socialists all, are the Hun hordes of our day.

My apologies to pigs.  It is the nature of pigs, who are rather intelligent animals, to be pig-headed.  It is supposed to be the nature of man to use his superior rational faculty.  The EPA's failure to do so, should not cast aspersions upon useful pigs.  I love that kind of pork, even as I loathe Congressional pork.  A useful animal should be given a measure of respect, even as a wrongheaded, and destructive, EPA gains only our disdain.