Claim: Americans will have to settle for less, to defeat climate change

A war with an imaginary enemy. Where have I read about that before?

I posted the following commentary on the Atlantic Monthly concerning the Rao article, only to see it blocked by the Atlantic Monthly’s staff within a few minutes of the time it went up:

President Obama has proposed a series of aggressive carbon pollution reduction targets — 28% by 2025, 32% by 2030, and 80% by 2050.
However, the administration’s Clean Power Plan will achieve less than half of the goal targeted for the year 2025. The only practical way to reduce America’s carbon emissions to the extent needed to achieve the President’s emission reduction targets is to directly constrain the production and consumption of all carbon fuels and to artificially raise the price of all carbon fuels to levels which will make them uncompetitive in the energy marketplace.
By law, the EPA is the lead agency of government charged with determining what pollution reduction measures are appropriate for mitigating the dangers of a pollutant which has been identified through an EPA-published Endangerment Finding as a danger to human health and the environment. The EPA is also responsible for developing and implementing the regulatory framework needed to enforce the necessary pollution abatement actions.
Because the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding for carbon has been successfully defended in the courts, the Executive Branch and the EPA now have full and unquestioned legal authority to regulate carbon emissions to the maximum extent possible under the Clean Air Act, and to do so without needing another word of new legislation from the US Congress to enforce strong anti-carbon measures.
But as it concerns the regulation of America’s carbon emissions, the Obama Administration is not using the EPA nearly to the extent the law not only allows, but also demands, now that an Endangerment Finding for carbon has been published and has been successfully defended in the courts.
The necessary steps towards aggressive decarbonization of America’s economy can be done through an integrated combination of two major anti-carbon measures administered by the EPA. The first measure would be to directly constrain emissions of carbon pollution through a specified series of state, regional, and national emission limits which are determined through the setting of an appropriate Ambient Air Quality Standard (AAQS) for carbon dioxide. The second measure would be to impose a corresponding framework of stiff carbon pollution fines which is the functional equivalent of a legislated carbon tax.
As long as the EPA properly follows its existing and well-tested regulatory rule-making processes and procedures; and as long as the anti-carbon regulations are themselves fair and impartial in their application, then this two-prong regulatory attack on carbon emissions can be made bulletproof against the threat of lawsuits. And so there exists today a clear and unambiguous public policy pathway towards decarbonizing America’s economy, if the EPA were to be given instructions by the Obama Administration to use its full legal authority in pursuit of that goal.

It is clearly apparent the Atlantic Monthly’s staff does not want their readership to know that the EPA and the Obama Administration have not gone nearly as far as the Clean Air Act allows them to go in aggressively regulating America’s carbon emissions.
Whether one believes that CO2 is ‘a dangerous pollutant when present in excessive atmospheric concentrations’ on the one hand, or else it is ‘a substance vital for life on earth’ on the other, it serves the interests of both positions to know that the EPA does in fact have clear legal authority, whether for good or for ill depending on one’s opinions, to push GHG regulation much more aggressively than it is now doing.