We Must Defeat the EPA Power Grab

By Alan Caruba

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history. The agency has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act—powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this by declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, in a proceeding known as the ‘endangerment finding.’”

So wrote George Allen and Marlo Lewis in a recent Forbes commentary. Allen is a former U.S. Senator and Governor from Virginia. Lewis is a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Senate is scheduled to vote June 10 on the Murkowski Resolution, S.J. Res. 26. If passed it will stop the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming rampage. The resolution has 41 sponsors, but needs 51 votes to pass. There will be no filibusters and no second change to reverse the worst attack on the U.S. economy and the freedom of Americans to utilize energy for business and personal use.

“If allowed to stand,” wrote Allen and Lewis, “the EPA’s endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Act. America could be burdened with a regulatory regime more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.”

Americans have witnessed the spending of billions in stimulus bills that have not reversed or slowed the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

They have witnessed the take-over of General Motors by the federal government.

They have watched this Democrat-controlled Congress ram through a healthcare “reform” bill that takes over one-sixth of the nation’s economy and a Cap-and-Trade Act, renamed a “climate” bill, is waiting for a vote.

When the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 no one ever imagined that it would exceed its mandate to ensure clean air and water to such an extent that it would pose a threat to the lives of Americans and to the economy.

It is in control of two people who are virulent environmentalists. Carol Browner, an Obama “czar” whose appointment was not subject to congressional oversight was an EPA administrator during the Clinton administration. She is an avowed socialist and close associate of former Vice President Al Gore. Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, worked with her before being selected to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

The same day Rasmussen Reports revealed that Barack Obama has the lowest approval rating of any previous President it was reported that Ms. Jackson had cancelled attendance at a political fundraiser in New York next week.

It must have occurred to someone in her office that, in the midst of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, that might not be a good idea. They scrubbed her participation saying “her priority has continued to be protecting human health and the environment.”

If that is an EPA priority it has pursued this goal in some strange ways.

For example, it has consistently banned some of the best pesticides ever invented to protect against termite infestations that do billions in damage every year or DDT that actually won a Nobel Prize for its protection of human life against the scourge of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

The EPA is so anti-chemical it is currently looking for a way to stop the use of oil dispersant chemicals to reduce the threat to marshes and other areas the spill may reach!

While this is happening, it is seeking to impose rules that would put an end to mountaintop coal mining, closing off access to an energy resource responsible for 50%of all the electricity used daily and putting an end to countless mining industry jobs.

The nation is now at a crossroads between a future in which the federal government, through the EPA, controls the entire economy or whether this evil genie gets put back in the bottle.

We live in an America in which the amount of water we can use to flush our toilets has been regulated and we will soon be unable to purchase an incandescent light bulb, one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind.

We live in a nation that requires that every gallon of gasoline include ethanol, an additive made from corn. So much corn is diverted to this that it has forced up the price of virtually every food product we purchase. At the same time it has reduced the mileage of every gallon.

If you have had a lingering feeling that something is terribly wrong, you’re right.

For now, the job at hand is to get the Murkowski resolution passed or, in effect, we might as well close the doors on America’s future because the EPA will destroy it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cap-and-Trade Insanity

By Alan Caruba

To understand how insane the Cap-and-Trade bill really is you need to know that it based on the belief that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to avoid a global warming that is NOT happening.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act is a giant scam involving “carbon credits” to be sold and traded. It is also about billions in taxpayer’s dollars being wasted on wind and solar generation of electricity. If this was a sensible way to produce energy, it would be a dominant producer, but it isn’t. Short of producing electricity by peddling bicycles, it is as inefficient and impractical as possible.

So-called “clean energy” accounts for just over one percent of all the electricity Americans use every day and it exists only because the government subsidizes it by taking your tax dollars and giving them to wind and solar energy producers. Some States require utilities to buy electricity from them.

As for “security”, how much energy security does the United States enjoy if it must import 60% of the oil it uses for transportation and a wide range of products, not the least of which is anything made from plastic?

Real security means drilling and mining right here, right now. There’s plenty of oil in ANWR and offshore. The government forbids access to it. And, where’s there’s oil there’s natural gas as well. As for coal, the U.S. has enough for centuries of affordable electricity, but the environmental organizations have in recent years stopped the building of a hundred coal-fired plants and they brag about it.

A study of the economic impact of the bill by the American Council on Capitol Formation and the National Association of Manufacturers concluded that, if passed, Cap-and-Trade would decrease the Gross Domestic Product of the United States by $2 and $3 trillion by 2030. That’s lost jobs and lost industrial production.

That’s because Cap-and-Trade would increase the cost of all activities, business and others, by increasing the cost of electricity, the master resource that powers everything in the nation.

Remember, this would be done to limit “greenhouse gas emissions.” This cost would solely be on the backs of Americans while other nations of the world would be free to continue emissions, i.e. providing jobs and producing goods.

Remember, too, that global warming is not occurring. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for a decade.

This bill is so horrible, Americans can only guess at the consequences of its passage. One thing is certain. It would massively expand government because thousands would have to be hired to administer it.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it would cost $8 billion over a ten-year period because to operate efficiently it would require the approval of approximately 1,500 new regulations and mandates involving at least 21 federal agencies.

The introduction of Cap-and-Trade would “create the nation’s largest commodity market in which polluters would buy and sell rights to emit carbon dioxide” according to a recent Washington Times article, but it is essential to understand that emitting CO2 is not “pollution.” Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant. It is a gas vital to all plant life on Earth. If CO2 were a pollutant, than surely oxygen is as well because oxidation causes rust.

The Cap-and-Trade’s carbon credits could “be a $2 trillion market within five years,” said Bart Chilton, commissioner of the Commodities Futures Trade Commission.

So Cap-and-Trade is NOT about greenhouse gases or global warming. It is about trading credits for the right to GENERATE or USE ENERGY.

How insane is that?

Keep in mind that the present financial crisis is the direct result of the GOVERNMENT getting into the mortgage loan market in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchasing loans from banking institutions and mortgage lenders who were required by law to make bad loans. Those loans, in turn, were “bundled” and resold as assets, but they were worthless.

Nothing is more worthless than carbon credits. Nothing is more dangerous to the economic future of the nation than the Cap-and-Trade Act. The U.S. Senate must defeat this bill which has already been passed by the House. YOU must defeat this bill by demanding your Senators vote against it.

USA on the Precipice of Destruction

By Alan Caruba

Watching the debate of the Waxman-Markey “Cap-and-Trade” bill that would impose limits on “greenhouse gas” emissions, allegedly to deter “global warming” one Congressman, reading from the script in front of him, said that there is no further debate on whether “global warming” is real and that “a consensus” of scientists concur. He lied.

Everything about “global warming” is a lie and has been since the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide the basis for the destruction of the world’s great, industrialized nations while exempting developing nations such as China and India from its mandates.

On my desk is a Global Warming Petition signed by 31,478 American Scientists. It says “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

“Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmosphere carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Along with other data I picked up in March while attending The Heartland Institute’s second International Conference on Climate Change is a summary for policymakers titled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.” Published by the Institute, it is the work of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. On June 2, the Institute will sponsor another comparable conference in Washington, D.C.

The national media will do its best to either ignore or disparage the science that will be presented by some of the nation’s leading climatologists and meteorologists. They have betrayed Americans for decades with their slavish repetition of environmental lies, their glorification of Earth Day, all things “Green”, and their attacks on so-called deniers and skeptics.

America needs all of its 330 million people to be skeptics. It needs them to shake off the lies about “global warming” and demand by calls, letters, faxes, and emails that Congress steps back from the entirety of this foul piece of legislation and to vote against it.

The United States of America is on the precipice of its own destruction and it will be the work of the Democrat members of Congress, the White House, and the work since the 1970s of all those self-anointed and self-proclaimed “environmentalists” who seek to destroy our economy.

“Cap-and-Trade” is a dagger at the heart of America. It will raise the cost of electricity, gasoline, and all forms of energy vital to the economy of the nation. It will enrich the federal government at the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. It is a form of taxation that will impact everything we purchase.

It is to the credit of the Republican Party that its members in Congress are waging a battle to deter this piece of legislation from becoming law. As one Republican Senator noted last evening, “Carbon dioxide is what we exhale, every one of us.” How difficult is it for anyone to understand that CO2 is not a threat and never was?

The threat is the hidden political agenda, socialist in its attempt to control the entire landmass of the nation, to lock away our vast natural energy resources, and to impose laws that will impoverish the present and future generations of America.

The despots of the world are watching and waiting for our destruction. They will celebrate in their palaces. They need not fire a single missile.

The Annual Green Orgy: Earth Day

By Alan Caruba

On Earth Day we will have been engulfed by the avalanche of “Green” propaganda that preceded it, fills the day, and then continues relentlessly thereafter.

When I say “propaganda”, I am being polite. Much of the foundation of the environmental movement is pure lies, mind boggling distortions of questionable “science”, and a thin veneer for the entire purpose of environmentalism, the imposing of a one-world agenda for the enrichment of a few who dream of a monopolistic control of the world’s resources and its human work force.

It would be managed for the uber-wealthy—an unelected group of elites, selected “world leaders” and politicians, plus a vast diplomatic corps backed up by the coercive might of police and armies answering not to sovereign nations, but the “new world order” exemplified by the United Nations.

If this sounds like some huge conspiratorial theory, one need only read books like “Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of The Commission on Global Governance” (1995, Oxford University Press) a product of the United Nations in which the vast web of UN treaties, most of which are rooted in environmental agendas, is spelled out.

While Americans provide billions to the United Nations as its greatest source of funding, the UN has been busy turning out the Wetlands Convention, Convention on Ship Pollution, Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals, UN Law of the Sea, Vienna Convention on Ozone Layer, Biological Diversity Convention, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, among many others.

This is the same United Nations that has yet to stop a single war since its founding after WWII, except through the intervention of U.S. military power. It has stood on the sidelines while we stopped North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in the 1950s, expressed concerns over our ill-fated Vietnam War, passed dozens of resolutions concerning the belligerence of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who had waged war against Iran for eight years and then invaded Kuwait. Then it watched as the U.S. finally rid the world of this maniac.

These days it continues to dither over the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, much as it has with regard to others. On the international stage, it continues to blame tiny Israel for all the ills of the world while most of the other Middle East nations remain in the grip of monarchs and dictators, devoid of any democracy or freedom.

The real problems in the world are largely tied to poverty and the oppression and corruption that facilitate it, but the United Nations is mostly composed of the very nations responsible for poverty, racism, sexism, and other ancient ills of mankind. It is a useless global doppelganger.

On Earth Day you will hear all manner of claims that the Earth is in severe environmental danger due to the human population, but what you won’t hear or read about is the 2009 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, an annual report by the Pacific Research Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. You won’t hear about the recovery of ecosystems in places like the Cuyahoga River—the one that literally caught fire in 1969—or Prince William Sound, the site of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill.

This year’s report notes that no American or Western European city ranks among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution. Wealthy nations pay attention to these problems. You won’t hear that, according to the U.S. Geological Survey sampling of drinking waters in 17 areas around the continental U.S., there was no or low presence of 258 different man-made chemicals. You won’t hear that stratospheric ozone—the good kind—appears to have reversed its long-term decline and is increasing over the U.S.

You won’t hear about these improvements because the U.S. press and media do not want you to hear about them and will not report them. As for the rest of the world, notably China and India, they are in a hurry to catch up with the success of the West. China keeps building coal-fired plants to provide the electricity necessary for an economy that must serve more than a billion people and India has launched itself on a program of nuclear power.

What you will hear is that the nations of the world must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, 2030 or 2050 or “global warming” will destroy the Earth. Only there is NO global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past decade and it is likely to last for several more decades.

There is no reason whatever for the endless schemes of the environmental organizations to demand that various industries reduce their “carbon footprint.”

An example of these idiotic proposals was announced by the Book Industry Environmental Council. Its goal is the reduction of the U.S. book industry’s “greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020 with the intent of achieving an 80% reduction by 2050.”

This ignores the fact that thousands of trees have to be cut down and ground into paper pulp for the endless production of largely idiotic books regurgitating nonsense about dieting while at the same time printing dozens more cookbooks. I have reviewed books for nearly fifty years and have seen enough rubbish published in every single year to fill scores of landfills.

Earth Day is a lie from start to finish.

Worse yet, it frightens small children into believing they are harming the Earth and it seeks to enslave adults into participating in programs that deprive them of a world that benefits from anything made from plastic, a derivative of oil, and many of the beneficial chemicals that protect them from the diseases spread by insect and rodent pests, and the mobility that our cars and trucks provide.

It seeks to limit access to more and more land and ocean areas, removing their vital resources of coal, oil, and natural gas from use by a human population that depends on the energy they generate.

The Earth Day orgy of lies will come and go, but the battle with this insidious movement, directed from the citadel of hatred called the United Nations, goes on.

Obama Motors!

By Alan Caruba

What legislators at the federal and state level don’t seem to understand is a fundamental law of thermodynamics. You cannot get more mileage out of a gallon of gasoline than it possesses. Every form of energy, oil, coal, natural gas, has a specific amount of energy it can produce when used.

When you add moonshine like ethanol to a gallon of gasoline, you actually reduce the amount of mileage you get for your dollar.

Meanwhile, the producers of the ethanol are lining their pockets with federal subsidies. Without the subsidies—taxpayer dollars—they would not be able to make a profit and since the ethanol fantasy has managed to drive up the cost of corn—normally a food product—some ethanol producers have already gone out of business because they couldn’t afford it!

California, home to more truly bad ideas about the environment than any other State, has enacted a “California Car Standard” to cut tailpipe emissions of “greenhouse gases.”

There is NO global warming and carbon dioxide has NO impact on the Earth’s climate except to show up in slightly higher amounts hundreds of years after a warming cycle has occurred. What Governor Schwarzenegger hasn’t figured out is that the Earth is well into a cooling cycle since 1998.

In California, all vehicles, cars and trucks, sold in the State will have to average 34.5 miles per gallon by 2015. Recent new standards for trucks, most of which would have to be retrofitted, means that fewer and fewer goods will be delivered in and to California because the cost of retrofitting is so high most truckers and fleet owners will simply decide to avoid doing business there.

Meanwhile, with the U.S. government imposing more and more emission demands on the auto manufacturers, they will ultimately have to start making cars out of paper mache in order to lighten the vehicle enough to achieve utterly meaingless mileage standards.

On top of that, the U.S. government is requiring automakers to make cars that very few people can afford or even want. Pretty soon we’ll have a new auto company, Obama Motors!

Isn’t it communism when the central government gets to decide what must be manufactured?

The effect of putting carbon dioxide emission limits in place on American cars ignores the fact that CO2 is being produced daily in China, India, Russia, Europe, and everywhere else in the world. Let’s not forget, too, that every human being on Earth emits about two pounds of the stuff every day.

The California standard has the effect of banning, not just SUVs, but midsize cars like the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry. Just how dumb is this?

It is interesting to note that Ford Motor Company has refused to line up for a government bailout. Back in the 1930s when the FDR administration passed a law requiring manufacturers to collude to set higher prices, Henry Ford refused to participate. He believed that competition was the best economic policy. People actually went to jail back then for selling a product or service for less than the price set.

Your President, elected by just barely 6% over the Republican candidate and accompanied by a huge Democrat majority in Congress, is pushing this nation into a deeper recession which in time, if nothing is done to reverse the process, will develop into a full blown depression.

You might want to keep this in mind in 2010 when it comes time to vote for members of Congress. Americans put the Republicans in control in 1994 and we can do it again. At this point, I would vote for a chimpanzee if it was a Republican!

The next politician who, like Al Gore, tells you that the Earth is facing a global warming calamity because of greenhouse gas emissions, should be voted out of office and into the nearest soup kitchen line.

How Bad Laws Get Enacted

By Alan Caruba

The way the Greens have imposed their agenda on America has largely been through deception, an often multi-layered effort to create the appearance of an environmental reality that does not exist.

A classic example of that is the current effort of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) that is wrongly presented as the cause of a non-existent global warming.

Other than oxygen, there is no other gas more essential to life on Earth than CO2. Regulating it is absurd!

The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank, has just filed its first comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on "Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act" which was published in the Federal Register on July 30, 2008. The deadline for public comments is November 28, 2008.

The complete Heartland comment is available online: http://www.heartland.org/article.html?articleid=24179

Among the objections The Heartland Institute noted was that the ANPR and its supporting documentation violate the Information Quality Act and "EPA Guidelines.”

“Much of the scientific evidence put forth by EPA staff in the proposed ANPR and its Technical Support Document (TSD) has taken the melodramatic form of climate alarmism without the appropriate balance of scientific and economic rationale that should have bearing on any environmental policy established by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

“There is a significant omission of climate science data published after 2006 and no coherent review of the debate in scientific literature. There is little evidence in the EPA Endangerment TSD to indicate that the climate is warming. The data provided are inaccurate and biased.”

And that, ladies and gents, is how you pass off bad science as good science.

The Heartland Institute evaluation further noted that the EPA cannot rely on incomplete draft documents to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

“The draft of the EPA Endangerment TSD is based upon the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Synthesis Report that was published for comment on July 17, 2008 and subsequently withdrawn. Only eight of the 21 underlying Synthesis and Assessment Products (SAP) had been finalized. NOAA withdrew its Synthesis Report after numerous complaints about the deficits it contained under the Information Quality Act. No further SAPs have been published, so what the ANPR includes by way of scientific documents is a draft based on a draft.”

Need it be said that the EPA relies on a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that suggests there is an anthropogenic (human) cause for global warming, but it does not cite any reports suggesting global warming may be due to natural causes?

“There are no studies of the relationships between shifting ice sheets and atmospheric temperatures."

"The IPCC report ignores the role of solar activity upon global temperatures. There is no discussion of the dynamic relationship between water vapor and global temperature.
These factors must be taken into consideration when determining the cause of increases in global temperatures and certainly when developing a national policy to establish a form of government climate control. Such a regulation would be pointless if the cause of global warming is not anthropogenic emissions.”

"The ANPR data are deficient because they rely upon the IPCC documents that link manmade greenhouse gas emissions to climate change based upon now-discredited computer modeling."

This is how this proposed regulation is being offered for comment and the Heartland Institute did not shrink from commenting “In short, the draft of the ANPR is a large regulation looking for a scientific basis."

"It provides sweeping powers across political and legal jurisdictions without a full hearing of the scientific, legal, or economic consequences of its implementation. EPA should not proceed without the full consent of Congress and a scientifically measurable guideline for success or failure of its outcomes.”

The lack of any real science behind most of what passes for environmental legislation and regulation is the factor that most distinguishes it.

This proposed regulation has no basis in fact, no support except from the usual flawed and often deliberately misleading “computer models” that the IPCC and others conjure up at a keystroke.

It's About Politics, Not Climate

By Alan Caruba

If you think global warming is about climate, think again.

It’s all about politics and, if you don’t believe me, maybe you will believe Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund. An April 16 news release from the EDF was titled “President’s Remarks Recognize Political Reality of Coming Action on Climate Change.”

This was a response to President Bush throwing seven years of resistance to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change overboard and letting it be Congress’s problem. In fact, since 1997 when the Senate, which must approve all treaties, unanimously refused to consider the Kyoto Protocol, any U.S. involvement in limiting “greenhouse gases” has been entirely voluntary.

Ironically, the U.S., according to a recent study by the Pacific Research Institute, is doing a better job than Europe and any of the other signatories to the treaty. Besides, why should the U.S. wreck its economy with emissions caps while China and India have always been exempt from the Protocol?

The Environmental Defense Fund, however, understands what the global warming scare is all about and it isn’t climate! The EDF news release said the White House announcement “marks a significant political shift in the debate over national climate legislation.”

As for legislating the climate, why not get Congress to pass a law against hurricanes like Katrina? Just make it illegal for a hurricane to make landfall anywhere in America. Sound nuts? That’s because legislating anything regarding the climate is nuts.

What EDF wants to know is whether the Bush administration will support “a bill that puts a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions, like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191), which is expected to come to a vote in the Senate in early June.”

“The bill would cap and reduce emissions roughly 19 percent below today’s levels by 2020 and 70 percent by 2050, putting the U.S. on the path to reduce emissions far enough and fast enough to help avoid the worst consequences of unchecked global warming.”

This is insane babbling. If you want to return to a level of GHG emissions comparable to just after the Civil War, that’s what this bill proposes.

The Earth is cooling and has been doing so noticeably since around 1998. The Sun’s radiation has been reduced for several years as the result of a lack of sunspot activity. According to NOAA, the oceans are growing cooler, not warmer. The ice caps of the poles have been growing, as have glaciers.

As for greenhouse gases, they are a miniscule part (0.038%) of the Earth’s atmosphere, but the EDF doesn’t want anyone to know that. “The only thing we’re lacking now is political will. The American public wants action, the business community wants action. It’s time for Congress to act,” Krupp said.

Does Fred Krupp speak for you? Is he, in effect, saying that global warming is a political issue, not a climate issue? Make up your own mind about that.