By Alan
Caruba
There are many things I do not like
about the Environmental Protection Agency, but what angers me most are the lies
that stream forth from it to justify programs that have no basis in fact or
science and which threaten the economy.
Currently, its “Clean Power” plan is
generating its latest and most duplicitous Administer, Gina McCarthy, to go
around saying that it will not be costly, nor cost jobs. “Clean Power” is the
name given to the EPA policy to reduce overall U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. It is requiring each state to cut its
emissions by varying amounts using a baseline established by the
EPA.
Simply said, there is no need whatever
to reduce CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide is not “a pollutant” as the EPA claims.
It is, along with oxygen for all living creatures, vital to the growth of all
vegetation. The more CO2 the better crops yields will occur, healthier forests,
and greener lawns. From a purely scientific point of view, it is absurd to
reduce emissions.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal on
April 22, Kenneth
C. Hill, Director of the Tennessee Regulatory Authority, said “Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) set off a firestorm when he advised
states not to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power
Plan. Yet that advice isn’t as radical as his detractors make it sound. As a
state public utilities commissioner who deals with the effects of federal
regulations on a regular basis, I also recommend that states not
comply.”
Noting its final due date in June,
that refusal would impose a Federal Implementation Plan on states “that risks
even greater harm,” said Hill. “But the problem for the EPA is that the federal
government lacks the legal authority under either the Constitution or the Clean
Air Act to enforce most of the regulation’s ‘building blocks’ without states’
acquiescence.”
As this is being written there is are
two joined cases before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, State of West Virginia v EPA and Murray Energy v EPA. They are a
challenge to President Obama’s “War on Coal” and the EPA efforts to regulate its
use. Fifteen states, along with select coal companies, have sued for an
“extraordinary whit” to prevent the EPA from promulgating the new carbon
regulations found it the Clean Power plan.
Writing in The Hill, Richard O. Faulk, an attorney
and senior director for Energy Natural Resources and the Environment for the Law
and Economics Center at George Mason University, noted that “The EPA’s argument
confidently hinges on convincing the courts that the Clean Air Act doesn’t mean
what it says. By its plain language, the bill prohibits the EPA from regulating the
power plants from which these emissions derive. Moreover, coal plants are
already addressed under an entirely different section of the bill than the one
EPA insists justifies its powers.”
The latest news as
reported by Myron Ebell, the director for energy and environment of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that “Senator
Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) this week introduced a bill to
block the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants. S. 1324,
the Affordable Reliable Energy Now Act, has 26
original co-sponsors, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate
Environmental and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), and
Democrat Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).”
“Both
Majority Leader McConnell and Chairman Inhofe have said that they are determined
to stop EPA’s greenhouse gas rules, so I expect quick action to move Capito’s
bill. In the House, a bill to block the rules, H. R. 2042, the Ratepayer Protection
Act, was
voted out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on 29th April and is
awaiting floor action.”
It’s worth noting that, when Obama
took office, fifty percent of America’s electrical energy was supplied by
coal-fired plants and, just six years later, that has been reduced by ten
percent. What kind of President would deliberately reduce American’s access to
affordable power?
It’s the same kind of President that
believes—or says he does—the pronouncements of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s “Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report”
claims that world will face “severe, pervasive and irreversible damage” if
coal-fired and other carbon-based—coal, oil, and natural gas—energy sources
aren’t replaced with “renewable energy sources”—wind and solar—by 2050. It wants
fossil-fueled power generation “phased out almost entirely by 2100.” Now this is just insanity, unless your agenda
is to destroy the world’s economic system and kill millions. That would be the
only outcome of the IPCC recommendations.
The columnist Larry
Bell, a professor at the University of Houston, points out that “As for
expecting renewables to fill in the power curve, European Union experiences
offer a painful reality check. Approximately 7.8 percent of Germany’s
electricity comes from wind, 4.5 percent from solar. Large as a result, German
households already fork out for the second highest power costs in Europe—often
as much as 30 percent above the levels seen in other European countries. Power
interruptions add to buyer’s remorse.”
As reported in The Heartland
Institute’s Environment &
Climate News “European governments, once at the vanguard of renewable
energy mandates, appear to be having second thoughts about their reliance on
giant wind farms…” There has been a sharp drop in such projects with
installations plunging 90% in Denmark, 75% in Italy, and 84% in Spain.
What the EPA is attempting to impose
on America is a drain on our production of electricity coupled with an increase
in its price. It is an obscene attack on our
economy.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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