Growing government in pursuit of "absurdity"

'EPA has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be 'absurd' in application and 'impossible to administer' by its self-imposed 2016 deadline. But the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion — to attempt to implement the rules'

Texas, which leads U.S. in job creation, blocks EPA's attempt to reorder the economy through greenhouse gas permitting

The state's slogan is "Don't mess with Texas." But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing just that, and at stake is whether the Obama administration can impose its global-warming agenda without a vote of Congress.

President Obama's EPA is already well down the path to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the act was not designed to do. It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.

The EPA, determined to move forward anyway, is attempting to rewrite the Clean Air Act administratively via a "tailoring rule," which would reduce the number of regulated sources. The problem with that approach? It's illegal. The EPA has no authority to rewrite the law. To pull it off, the EPA needs every state with a State Implementation Plan to rewrite all of its statutory thresholds as well.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:

"In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency's recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations - regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. ... To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions."

Texas leaders are doing what Congress so far has been unable to do (a Senate vote to stop the EPA's global-warming power grab got just 47 votes on June 10): take on the EPA. Good thing, because Texas would be hit especially hard by these regulations.

Federalist principles have allowed Texas to become the strongest state in the union. The Lone Star State leads the nation in job creation, is the top state for business relocation and has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state and is the top state for wind generation. President Obama said he wants to double U.S. exports in five years; he could look to Texas, as we are the top exporting state in the country. The Obama administration could learn a lot from Texas.

Instead, it is attempting to ride roughshod over Texas, and it goes beyond the greenhouse-gas issue.

As the oil spill spreads, college kids using daddy's boat search for oil, the Coast Guard counts life preservers, and others "do squat"

So far, the effort to contain the spill has been pathetic. Oil washes up, and after a while a truck arrives with a cleaning crew hired from distant states, who mop-up or shovel it into plastic bags that may or may not get picked up later. They then return to sit under a tent until the next call comes or, as has happened in a few cases, a sheriff arrives to arrest them on outstanding warrants. Meantime, fleets of college kids using daddy’s fishing boat are being paid up to $2,000 a day to tool around looking for oil.

Each morning seems to bring a new fool’s errand. On June 18, for example, the U.S. Coast Guard apprehended a dozen oil-skimming barges in the midst of performing their duty, and shut down their operations for the rest of the day in order to determine if they were carrying the proper number of life preservers and fire extinguishers. If the Coast Guard was so worried about safety, why not simply take a big pile of life preservers and fire extinguishers out to these craft and hand them around, so that the skimmers could keep at their essential job?

But that is not the way government operates. At least not this government, which has created a perfect storm of bureaucratic and regulatory gridlock around the Deep-water Horizon disaster. Whatever is done to prevent the oil from coming ashore must be approved by the EPA, OSHA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and a host of lesser bureaucracies.

The world has watched the excruciating process unfold and learned strange new expressions such as “Top Hat,” “Junk Shot,” and “Top Kill.” Nothing worked until finally some sort of contraption was lowered over the leaking well, which now captures much of the oil. But why did this all drag out so long, with weeks passing in between BP’s various attempts to stem the flow? Apparently BP would wait until one effort failed before starting another, instead of having everything in place for a new attempt as soon as they gave up on the last. What were our leaders thinking?

All the while, a gargantuan mass of oil has been accumulating in the Gulf of Mexico—not as a monolithic slick, but in many forms. It comes sometimes as thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of foamy fingers of “orange mousse” or as a sheen or as tarballs or in thick brown globs or pods of oily slab hundreds of acres (or even miles) wide. Day and night it drifts out there, twisting and turning amorphously with the wind, tides, and currents, and washing ashore from Louisiana to Florida—soiling, stinking, killing. And what were the responsible parties doing all this time—those institutions that are supposed to be protecting citizens from this kind of nightmare? From all appearances, they were doing squat!

Murkowski bid to stop EPA power graf fails in 47-53 Senate vote

The Senate on Thursday halted Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s effort to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from factories, power plants and other large polluters.

Her measure failed 47-53, largely on party lines, although the Alaska Republican had the support of six Democrats. Had it passed, the White House said this week that President Barack Obama would have vetoed it anyway.

The Senate spent six hours debating the measure, which came up in a rarely used procedural move known as a disapproval resolution. Because of the unusual nature of the measure, the Senate put aside all of its other business to take up Murkowski’s disapproval resolution.

The vote came the same day as a new Washington Post-ABC News poll showing broad public support for EPA oversight of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. About 71 percent of those surveyed support federal regulation of greenhouse gases from sources such as power plants, automobiles and factories, the poll found.

Calling the Clean Air Act “an awful choice for reducing” emissions that lead to global warming, Murkowski made the case that allowing the EPA to write such regulations would cost jobs, hurt the economy and cede to the Obama administration authority that should be up to Congress. Murkowski’s Alaska colleague, Democrat Mark Begich, voted against her proposal.

Sen. Scott Brown will support effort to block EPA power grab

Sen. Scott Brown plans to support a controversial resolution that would restrict the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases.

In an op-ed in the Cape Cod Times, Brown said giving too much power to regulators might end up hurting businesses and the economy.

“This action would give an unelected and unaccountable government agency the power to impose restrictive and damaging carbon dioxide regulations that will drive up energy prices and hurt job-creating small businesses in our country,” Brown wrote.

The Massachusetts Republican has been under enormous pressure from both supporters and critics of the measure. A liberal union group has launched an last-minute TV advertising blitz to convince Brown to vote against the resolution.

Instead of devoting its efforts to social engineering, why hasn't the EPA required that drillers develop remedies for calamities?

Reckless capitalism resulted in the Gulf oil explosion and resulting spill, which will do incalculable damage before it is remediated.

Reckless social engineering, inspired by leftist schemes to place all human activity under governmental control, bears responsibility for the failure to have control mechanisms in place to deal with the oil platform explosion and resulting catastrophe.

The event itself was predictable, if not in detail. Something, somewhere, was going to interfere with completion of a deep-sea oil well. What would happen then? Were there any shut-off valves spaced along the completed portions of the pipeline. Was there a system in place to cap the pipeline at the break?

In a rational political system, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is, after all, charged with protecting the natural environment, might have asked such questions and acted on the answers.

The EPA, however, is not much interested in such mundane questions. The EPA is more interested in seeing that carbon dioxide, which plants inhale before exhaling oxygen, in a natural process essential to life, be designated a dangerous gas that eventually will cause the oceans to boil.

That is the entry-level argument that the EPA makes in its effort to persuade American voters to cede their preferences, including their source of power supply, to the government, which could then shut coal mines and nuclear power plants and dot the countryside with windmills.

In other words, the EPA wants the United States to adopt a policy that has proved to be a catastrophic failure in Spain.

Why hasn't the EPA spent its time insisting that deep-sea oil drillers have mechanisms and plans in place to deal with an explosion that results in oil gushing from a pipeline one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico?

The real answer is that there is no romance and little applause to be had from providing practical answers to inevitable calamities.

The romance lies in reengineering American society so that the leftists who provide the plans can determine how people live, what they buy, and when they die.

This plan is readily available. It's called the Obama agenda.

Life imitates art as Texas takes on EPA over CO2

In 2005, the late Dr. Michael Crichton wrote a book of fiction called State of Fear. The plot of the storyline is the exposé of the fraudulent science behind the global warming theory in the middle of a fictitious court case. The book was a bestseller, and in a strange twist of circumstances, it landed Dr. Crichton in front of a Senate committee. Now it seems that life is indeed imitating art.

In the past few years, there have been many court cases concerning the actions of governments to the alleged threat of global warming. The latest has been filed by Texas against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with respect to the Endangerment Finding of Carbon Dioxide (CO2).

Texas has filed two petitions in federal court. The first is a request for review of the endangerment finding, which is intended to examine the science behind global warming. The second is a petition for reconsideration of the finding. These court cases were brought about in the wake of the Climategate scandal. Climategate has revealed that significant portions of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) were based on fraudulent science.

Post climategate, cap and trade not such a hot idea

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., has signed on to legislation that would block the EPA from implementing its proposed greenhouse gas regulations. That’s a pretty clear sign that House Democrats are feeling the heat on climate change.

Skelton, 78, has been in Congress for 33 years and is chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee. But in 2010 he may face a tough re-election fight.

Last June, Skelton voted with his party leadership for a cap-and-trade bill. The measure passed the House 219-212.

According to Politico, Skelton has tried to present his cap-and-trade vote to the folks back home as an effort to protect people from the EPA. The thinking here is that since it would be Congress, not the Obama administration, writing the emissions reduction rules, it would be much better.

Whether or not Skelton’s constituents were buying that, it became irrelevant once the bill stalled in the Senate. That created the possibility that the EPA would simply assert the right to regulate greenhouse gases on its own.

Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce and now Democrats like House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., are pushing legislation to prevent that.

Skelton has signed on to Peterson’s bill, which would reverse the EPA finding that greenhouse gases are a pollutant.

Walter Williams: Why spend billions to remediate bogus science on global warming?

Private industry and governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars in the name of saving our planet from manmade global warming. Academic institutions, think tanks and schools have altered their curricula and agenda to accommodate what was seen as the global warming "consensus."

Mounting evidence suggests that claims of manmade global warming might turn out to be the greatest hoax in mankind's history. Immune and hostile to the evidence, President Barack Obama's administration and most of the U.S. Congress sides with Climate Czar Carol Browner, who says, "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real."

(snip)

Given all the false claims and evidence pointing to scientific fraud, I don't think it wise to continue spending billions of dollars and enacting economically crippling regulations in the name of fighting global warming.

At the minimum, we should stop the Environmental Protection Agency from going on with their plans to regulate carbon emissions. Companies should resign from the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobbying group of businesses and radical environmentalists. Dr. Tom Borelli, who is director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, says that BP, Caterpillar, Conoco Phillips, Marsh, Inc. and Xerox have the common sense to do so already.

DDT: unintended consequences can be lethal

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives.

With EPA seizure of tax and regulatory power, White House activates doomsday machine

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday that her ruling that greenhouses gases are dangerous pollutants would "cement 2009's place in history" as the moment when the U.S. began "seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform." She's right that this is an historic decision, though not to her or the White House's credit, and "seizing" is the right term. President Obama isn't about to let a trifle like democratic consent impede his climate agenda.

With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon. With this doomsday machine activated, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish what persuasion and debate among his own party manifestly cannot.

This reckless "endangerment finding" is a political ultimatum: The many Democrats wary of {imposing} huge new costs on their constituents must surrender, or else the EPA's carbon police will inflict even worse consequences.

The gambit is also meant to coerce businesses, on the theory that they'll beg for cap and trade once the command-and-control regulatory pain grows too acute—not to mention the extra bribes in the form of valuable carbon permits that Democrats, since you ask, are happy to dispense. Ms. Jackson appealed to "the science" and waved off any political implications, yet the formal finding was not coincidentally announced at the start of the U.N.'s Copenhagen climate conference (see above).

What EPA report on warming advised: ignore UN

"Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told "Fox & Friends" Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming.

"The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which is what they were thinking of doing and in fact have done," Carlin said.

Asked what happened to his study once it was completed, Carlin said "my supervisors decided not to forward it to the group within EPA who had the responsibility for preparing an overall report which would guide EPA on whether to find that the emission of global warming gases would be something that EPA should regulate."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Suppressed-EPA-scientist-breaks-silence-speaks-on-Fox-News-49513762.html

Sen. Inhofe: EPA hiding skeptical paper on warming

"A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. "We're going to expose it."

The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be "dead on arrival" in the Senate despite President Obama's energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/gop-senator-calls-
inquiry-supressed-climate-change-report/?test=latestnews

As earth cools, critic says EPA hiding inconvenient findings to protect its global warming narrative

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.

New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases. All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.

The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.

“While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman."

http://cei.org/news-release/2009/06/25/cei-releases-
global-warming-study-censored-epa

EPA takes charge of the weather, plans to deprive plants and trees of carbon dioxide, other gases

My tribe paid a high price for venturing into the distant wilderness without first consulting the Environmental Protection Agency.

Some reached the coast of what would become Newfoundland, where their settlement was unearthed decades ago. Others settled in what became Iceland, where they set up a primitive democracy that still endures a thousand years later.

Another group of Norwegian Vikings hauled up on the shores of Greenland, which appeared to them a land of milk and honey. They established farms, and appear to have prospered for more than three centuries.

As things turned out, they had happened upon Greenland during a period of warming. Then the ice came back and all of them died. The Little Ice Age, which ranged from approximately 1350 to 1850, had arrived.

In retrospect, it seems so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. Weather changes, sometimes remarkably fast and furiously, sometimes slowly but ferociously. Those who are in the wrong place often die.

Now, however, the weather is about to play a new, unprecedented political role, and the EPA is becoming the point of the spear in a neo-fascist scheme devised by the Obama administration to take unprecedented control of the American economy.

The EPA has ruled that current higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and related gases are the "unambiguous result of human emissions."

Scientific research shows that the more greenhouse gases there are in the atmosphere the more heat is trapped, raising the earth's temperature.

The EPA has endorsed that research and determined that "natural variations" in climatic conditions, such as solar activity, couldn't explain rising temperatures.

Okay. How, then, does the EPA explain the warming that transformed Greenland from a big block of ice into fertile land that my fellow Norwegian tribesmen farmed for about 350 years?

No one was there when they arrived. What, if not solar activity, had turned up the temperature in Greenland? The EPA has to answer that question or I, for one, will deliver the derisive laughter that propaganda organization so richly deserves.

To reach its desired conclusion, long in the making, the EPA draws two arguable conclusions:

1. Higher temperatures are undesirable and must be prevented.

2. Higher temperatures can be stopped by government regulation of carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas that humans exhale and plants inhale, and other greenhouse gases.

Never mind that the evidence for global warming - a less-than-one-degree rise in average temperature over 100 years - is worthy of derisive laughter.

Never mind that the average temperature has actually been falling for the last seven years.

By happenstance, Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed some of these questions at the just-concluded Obama-Chavez festival in Trinidad and Tobago, where he warned that the Caribbean region faces "very, very scary" rises in sea levels and intensifying hurricanes, while Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be flooded.

But skeptics promptly pounced on Chu's claims.

"Secretary Chu still seems to believe that computer model predictions decades or 100 years from now are some sort of 'evidence' of a looming climate catastrophe," said Marc Morano, executive editor of ClimateDepot.com and former top aide to global warming critic Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

"Secretary Chu's assertions on sea level rise and hurricanes are quite simply being proven wrong by the latest climate data. As the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute reported in December 12, 2008: There is 'no evidence for accelerated sea-level rise.'"

Hurricane activity in both hemispheres is at 30-year lows, Morano said, and experts such as MIT's Kerry Emanuel and Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "are now backing off their previous dire predictions."

Trouble is, neither skepticism nor contrary evidence will deter the neo-fascists, who are determined to take control of the economy because free enterprise and consumer preferences haven't delivered the result they want: a nanny government that determines which cars we drive across a landscape dotted with windmills and "Obama Saves" signs.