While President Obama is on television talking about creating jobs, news of his EPA’s war on business was announced. They say that greenhouse gases are harmful to humans. As if they give a hoot about human beings.
The Houston Chronicle reports:
The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that climate changing pollution threatens the public health and the environment.
The announcement came as the Obama administration looked to boost its arguments at an international climate conference that the United States is aggressively taking actions to combat global warming, even though Congress has yet to act on climate legislation. The conference opened Monday in Copenhagen.
The EPA said that the scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people” and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
“These long-overdue findings cement 2009′s place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at news conference.
The action by the EPA, which has been anticipated for months, clearly was timed to add to the momentum toward some sort of agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen conference and try to push Congress to approve climate legislation.
Do you ever feel like you’re living in some alternate reality than these people? My local newspaper’s front page headline today is “Nations Must ‘Dig Deeper’ on Emissions.” (No link found at their website, but the article is the same as this AP story.) This is the same “news” business whose editors claim they reserve the front page for local news. There are two more pages devoted to the Copenhagen conference, with only a tiny little four-paragraph blurb about how a UN official admiteed the CRU’s hacked emails are damaging to the scientists’ reputations, but “evidence of a warming Earth is solid.” Oh really?
The American business community knows how bad the EPA’s action will be for the bottom line, so it’s no wonder they are fuming, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Officials gather in Copenhagen this week for an international climate summit, but business leaders are focusing even more on Washington, where the Obama administration is expected as early as Monday to formally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.
An “endangerment” finding by the Environmental Protection Agency could pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions — even if Congress doesn’t pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.
Many business groups are opposed to EPA efforts to curb a gas as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.
An EPA endangerment finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said in a statement. “The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don’t stifle our economic recovery,” he said, noting that the group supports federal legislation.
EPA action won’t do much to combat climate change, and “is certain to come at a huge cost to the economy,” said the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group that stands as a proxy for U.S. industry. …
Really, it’s all enough to make your head explode. But be careful, you may emit some greenhouse gases and be fined by the EPA.
EPA bureaucrats legislating by fiat. Don’t we have something called a “congress” to make “laws”?
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