From Junk Science. Originally posted in the Daily Caller.
My latest at the Daily Caller.
The Supreme Court has just essentially ended the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to directly regulate greenhouse gases. But don’t expect the Biden EPA to let that stop it.
Today’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA puts an end to the agency’s scheming over the past 24 years to invent its own authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
This scheme culminated in 2015 with the Obama EPA’s “Clean Power Plan,” through which it planned to reduce the amount of coal burning by electric utilities.
In combination with other Obama EPA activities that comprised its infamous “war on coal,” the Clean Power Plan helped send virtually the entire U.S. coal industry into bankruptcy, killed 50,000 high paying coal jobs and devastated coal industry dependent communities.
But the Court has now held that the Clean Power Plan was illegal.
“Congress did not grant EPA … the authority to devise emissions caps based on the generation shifting approach the Agency took in the Clean Power Plan,” a 6-3 majority wrote.
Expanding on this point, the majority wrote, “We cannot ignore that the regulatory writ EPA newly uncovered conveniently enabled it to enact a program that, long after the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions had become well known, Congress considered and rejected multiple times.”
As someone who worked in the coal industry during the Obama years and witnessed first-hand the hardships caused by the rogue Obama EPA, my first reaction is:
“Where do coal industry investors, employees and communities go to recoup their losses caused by illegal government activity?”
Although today’s Court holding is technically limited to vaporizing the Clean Power Plan, it’s hard to see how any EPA regulation of greenhouse gases is legal since Congress never authorized such regulation.
Will the Biden EPA care? Not likely.
It will now turn to other schemes to regulate greenhouse gases, especially through air quality regulations involving ozone and particulate matter (i.e., soot and dust).
As the Obama EPA reasoned and implemented in its war-on-coal regulations, greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants can be reduced as a collateral effect if limits are placed on the amounts of ozone-forming and particulate emissions that are allowed to be emitted from coal plants.
Although EPA does have clear authority to regulate those emissions, it has twisted the related science to the point where it claims that no emissions from coal plants are safe for human health. This is patently and demonstrably false, but the Biden EPA doesn’t care.
The only hope of stopping this illegal EPA scheme before more pointless damage is done to our country is a separate ongoing federal lawsuit. The case of Young v. EPA, which is pending decision in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., could slow the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the back door of ozone and particulate matter.
The plaintiffs in Young v. EPA have alleged that EPA illegally stacked its science review boards with agency cronies so as to rig the science related to ozone and particulate emissions. It’s a decision that could be every bit as momentous as West Virginia v. EPA.
One thing is for sure. The EPA is essentially a gangster agency, scheming and thuggish in pursuit of its political goals.
SCOTUS has now reined in EPA a bit. But there is still much more to do.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.
Let’s not be too hasty. One of the big intended/unintended consequences of EPA directives is making American car/truck market unaffordable to go along with unaffordable housing and energy. EPA and their Party handlers need to take the blame squarely as this unfolds.
All this can be rubber-stamped by someone else.
The U.S. Senate members will do what the handlers tell them to do. Near-unanimously, with exception of Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, who negate each other most of the time and don’t matter either way.
Anyhow, nobody is going to take any blame. The whole point of “science based policies” is that the buck never has to stop anywhere at all, because the bureaucrats only need to point at the next building and say “What? The buck? Those guys dissected him well and good, we trust their diligence”. And since they are the ones who pay those guys, the laboratory quickly turned into a butcher shop auctioning the juiciest meat.
The EPA balloon just got busted:
The Supreme Court just confirmed that the EPA cannot pick winners and losers to meet the electricity and products demanded by society. Clean Energy is only Clean ELECTRICITY.
Those clean renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, can only generate ELECTRICITY, and intermittent electricity at best from available breezes and sunshine. The undisputable science is that renewables CANNOT manufacture any of the oil derivatives that are the basis of the thousands of products that are the foundation of societies and economies around the world.
Unreliables cannot produce enough energy to power the machinery needed to reproduce themselves. Eliminate fossil fuels, and you eliminate unreliables, simple as that.
A fact supported by unhappy news from wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers, moaning about how their costs have exploded and their profits have vapourized in wake of the skyrocketing cost of real energy in the form of coal, oil and gas.
I wonder how the wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers explain the decline in demand for their products, given that their products’ competitors’ prices have gone up just as much. You would think that with competitors’ prices ‘skyrocketing’ they would easily compete. I wonder if there’s any glimmer of recognition in their boardrooms that they have run the scam to its limit and it’s now over.
I hope they all go broke, and soon.
And copper and steel.
Self-destructing societies litter their landscapes with IWD’s. (Intermittent, Weather Dependent)
As one insightful pundit has noted, alternatives are “parasitic” energy sources. They are useless without a stable host energy source.
Does that nullify Massachusetts v, EPA Endangerment Finding?
West Virginia v. EPA Could Overturn 2009 Carbon Endangerment Finding Now Strangling America’s Electricity GridJune 29, 2022
https://conservativefiringline.com/west-virginia-v-epa-could-overturn-2009-carbon-endangerment-finding-now-strangling-americas-electricity-grid/
One more Supreme Court case to keep your eye on this session — especially since the Court now appears willing to strike down prior precedents — is the imminent ruling on West Virginia v. EPA that, if successful, would overturn federal regulations on carbon emissions by power plants.
It also stands to potentially overturn the Court’s 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, a narrow 5-4 ruling by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy that had opened the door for federal regulation in this area in the first place by stating carbon dioxide could be regulated under the terms of the Clean Air Act even though the law never contemplated doing so.
This is what enabled the 2009 carbon endangerment finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the Obama administration, and the EPA rules on new and existing power plants, defining carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act, and setting forth a framework to incentivize coal plants to either be retrofitted to be natural gas plants or else be shut down.
In terms of moving the needle, the policy was a “success” in reducing coal-based electricity. In 2007, coal-generated electricity made up 49 percent of the total U.S. grid, while natural gas was just 21 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration. In 2021, natural gas now makes up 38.3 percent of the grid, and coal is down to 21 percent.
In the meantime, we have rising demand for electricity, and yet the U.S. is not producing a single kilowatt hour (kWh) more than it was 15 years ago. Despite the U.S. population growing by 30 million to more than 331 million from 2007 to 2021, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from 4.005 trillion kWh in 2007 to 3.96 trillion kWh in 2021.
As a result, the Consumer Price Index for electricity has increased by 29 percent since 2007, according to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In short, we have a self-imposed national electricity shortage, in large part caused by the Supreme Court — and they might be about to undo it.
On the other hand, the Court could always go the other way on the issue. After all, in 1983, the Supreme Court unanimously decided in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association v. State Farm Mutual that in rescinding a regulation under the Administrative Procedures Act, an agency must provide a reasoned analysis, “for the change beyond that which may be required when an agency does not act in the first instance.”
This leaves every rescission subject to judicial review, where you have to prove not only that rescinding the regulation in question is rational based on the statutory scheme, but prove that enacting it was irrational to begin with. That appears to be one reason why the Trump administration EPA did not go further than it did in watering down the Obama Clean Power Plan regulations.
That is how a ruling allowing carbon emissions to be regulated eventually becomes a precedent requiring carbon emissions to be regulated.
Again, it’s a situation where because of Supreme Court precedents, Congress and presidential administrations appear to be hampered from responding effectively to national crises like energy shortages. It is therefore undemocratic and ultimately prevents political questions from being answered by the elected branches the way their supposed to.
The worst possible outcome would be if the Court once again accepts the central premise that carbon dioxide is a harmful pollutant that must be addressed under the Clean Air Act. At that point, there might not be an easy way to stop something like the Green New Deal’s goals of imposing net zero carbon emissions within 10 years on the U.S. economy.
But we’ll see what happens. This could be another big one. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Cross-posted with The Daily Torch
I don’t understand how hard it is to prove that CO2 is not a harmful pollutant – 1 sentence – “Whereas it is commonly known that plants and plankton need CO2 to live, that they are the base of the whole food chain that we depend on, and that plants prefer a much higher level of CO2 than currently exists, and in fact it can be said that plants are starving – therefore CO2 is not a pollutant.
And I would then go on to argue that human’s need to do everything they can to increase the CO2 levels for the sake of the biosphere.
Wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other. They will ignore it.
1)No.
2)The GHG Finding of Endangerment still exists and is the basis for regulating CO2, etc.
3)People on both sides are grossly overstating the impact of WV vs EPA. This is a very limited ruling.
4)EPA can still regulate CO2 on an emission unit basis, or could set a National Ambient Air Quality Standard and then demand states develop a State Implementation Plan that would effect an even larger number of sources.
5) This did not overturn “Chevon” and does not require Congress to act before EPA regulates CO2.
Let’s remove the fluff and look at the core concepts. I suspect this ruling is FAR more significant than you think:
Here’s a more complete extract from a different part of the ruling that addresses Chevron more head-on. [I’ve removed the legalese references]
Bottom line: ANY “sensible solution” to a “decision of such magnitude” is NOT allowed if just created by regulators. Congress MUST make those decisions.
And, here’s the first sentence of the opposing SCOTUS judges!
Thus, I firmly believe @T Gasloli is incorrect:
This was never going to be a straightforward win, the EPA and Biden regime have doubtless been scheming over the decision.
Do we know when the decision of Young v. EPA will be announced? And will Ketanji Brown Jackson have a bearing on it?
‘And will Ketanji Brown Jackson have a bearing on it?’
She can only ignore the Constitution to the same extent as her predecessor, but I suppose she could also condemn it as being ‘racist’, so there’s that aspect to consider.
Ketanji Brown Jackson will just replace Stephen Breyer when the new session begins in the Fall and become the new bookend on all Leftist opinions, so that is just a one for one replacement. There will now be three anti-Constitution Leftist feminists voting in a block as opposed to the two anti-Constitution Leftist feminists plus the anti-Constitution Leftist gelding.
But but but KBJ doesn’t know if she’s a woman because she’s not a biologist. So feminist doesn’t apply?
And Ketanji Brown Jackson is not a climate scientist, so she will have to bow out on any determinations that matter. Since she is also not a farmer, she will have to bow out on any determinations about commercial agricultural usage vs. Federal land management overreach, and since she is not an ordained minister, she won’t be able to make determinations on religious matters, and since she does not run a Big Tech business, she won’t be able to ……………..
LOL!
What does biology have to do with gender identification? (in today’s woke world)
In my humble opinion it makes ALL of the difference! And, you do NOT have to be a biologist, either. One quick glance in your own pants should suffice.
This ruling has made an even bigger impact on the [UK] media elites than Roe v Wade.
We’ve already had the call from UK doctors to provide American women with free abortions
“Britain should offer abortions to American women for FREE in wake of Roe v Wade ruling, doctors say British Medical Association has agreed to lobby the Government on the issue” – Daily Fail
Who’s paying for the flights etc? Who knows?
In the case of the EPA
“In a 6-3 decision, the openly partisan and undemocratic court ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by fossil-fuel-producing states against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).” –
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/30/us-supreme-court-epa-decision-devastating-humanity
Democracy is the problem, as the Guardian says: “More than a quarter of members of Congress are still hard climate deniers. “ There’s plenty of ranting the article’s worth a read just to see how unhinged they’re getting at The Guardian.
“‘Condemning everyone alive’: outrage at US supreme court climate ruling
Limiting the Environmental Protection Agency at a time when fossil fuel emissions need to be curbed is ‘devastating’”
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/jun/30/supreme-court-ruling-epa-west-virginia-climate-experts-activists-lawyers
It’s popcorn time.
Human rites and Green profits[y], respectively.
Only what you would expect from the Guardian. The BBC will take the same line, assuming there is anyone in that organisation that understands it.
It might be the UK Guardian, but it’s written by Peter Kalmus – the idiot behind the ‘scientists against climate change’ fiasco. I guess he’s found a new home at the Grauniad where his whining drivel will fit right in!
“Britain should offer abortions to American women for FREE in wake of Roe v Wade ruling, doctors say British Medical Association has agreed to lobby the Government on the issue” –
How about saving the British Taxpayer millions by simply supplying, on request, a Morning After Pill?
‘How about saving the British Taxpayer millions by simply supplying, on request, a Morning After Pill?’
We don’t want to force anyone to have to make a snap decision. Best to mull these things over for 8-9 months, or so.
Do they want to be liable for all the damaging after-effects?
How about just grow up and have the poor little baby like people have been doing for millennia?
Or at the very least, got to pay for the abortion if one can afford it.
Be subject to the payment for the service demanded, and stop robbing the tax payers.
cheers
How about saving the British Taxpayer millions by simply supplying, on request, a Morning After Pill?
…which Ann Landers once advised was most effective when held firmly between the woman’s knees at all times during intimacy. (Actually that was The Pill, not Plan B.)
A reader wrote in subsequently to inform her that it was possible to have sex with your knees together. You just have to want to.
Comment is free? Of reality, of truth, of any knowledgeable insight.
They are saying the silent part out loud. Democracy is a problem, so they want to replace it with selfish, mega-ultra-corrupt bureaucrats who are accountable to no one.
They will be responsible to the party.
“Undemocratic”???
The paper points out that the court VOTED 6 to 3 in striking down RoeVsWade (which itself was based on lies).
And after the ruling, polls have shown more than 50% SUPPORT for the decision.
It’s amazing how well people can resist the constant brainwashing coming from the media, woke groups and politicians.
Yet another example of the leftist belief that it’s only Democracy, when they win.
When Leftists say “Democracy”, they really mean “Socialism/Communism”.
In THEIR minds (?) it means only one thing: Mob rule!
“Democracy is the problem, as the Guardian says: “More than a quarter of members of Congress are still hard climate deniers.”
Really? Who might these “hard climate deniers” be?
I don’t see anyone in Congresss, Democrat or Republican, challenging the basic premise that CO2 can cause catastrophic effects in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nobody, except Senator James Inhofe, and he’s retiring this year.
Republicans only challenge the economics of regulating CO2, but do not question whether CO2 needs to be regulated. They wrongly assume it does.
Human beings as easily influenced by propaganda and social pressure. Even Republicans.
Well there’s Ted Cruz, but who else?
It’s way over the top declaring the EPA a “gangster agency”. They are just another Federal agency, along with many or most State agencies, who decide what they want to do, and then do it until the courts or Congress either stops them, or lets them continue. EPA was clearly unauthorized to do what they did, but it was also done with not only the blessing but the command of the President. Agencies tend to do what the Boss tells them to do, again, until stopped by someone else. All Presidents routinely exceed their authority no matter who they are or what party they belong to. Trump certainly exceeded his authority numerous times and was shot down by lawsuits and court decisions as often or more often than any recent President. Even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were routinely accused by their opposition of exceeding their Presidential authorities, and sometimes the won and sometimes they lost.
All policies are always a struggle between different interest groups and viewpoints.
“ Agencies tend to do what the Boss tells them to do, again, until stopped by someone else. ”
That is hilarious. Good one.
They are an anarchistic Augiasstal. Never knowing when to stop, one ruling after another, and then another one. All done by people who never had a productive day in their life, but who thrive on telling others what not to do. Only sociopaths would aspire to a non-job like that.
They are a gangster agency – a protection racket controlled by special interests.
Similarly, Alberta has found that environmentalist opposition has been funded by Russian interests who want to get rid of the competition.
Similarly, Biden has been putting the screws to US oil industry while encouraging production from foreign sources – how does that help the environment, especially when those foreign sources have much less environmental regulation? I wonder what proportion from the sources of Democratic party funding is represented by reliable energy producers, workers and their unions.
What causes the civil service to become malign?
People talk about the Deep State wherein the civil service becomes a power unto itself and difficult to control by the legislature.
IMHO, the problem is one of motivation rather than something like hard core ideology or outright corruption.
If you are a civil servant, your position within the wage scale is determined, among other things, by how many people you manage. You could fight your way up the ladder or you could invent a new bureaucracy to regulate something that wasn’t previously regulated (for instance). It’s called empire building. It explains why the civil service always grows and never shrinks, expands its tentacles into places they don’t belong, and transmogrifies a formerly sensible building code into several thousand pages that nobody can understand. Stuff like that.
What causes the civil service to become malign?
It’s just Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
In summary: Every bureaucracy, no matter what its original aims were, ends up giving top priority to itself.
We know this, so why do we ignore it. Pournelle’s Iron Law is a corollary of the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
The only answer for the problem is to create sufficient churn that an elite can’t entrench itself.
Jordan Peterson has observed that the people who end up taking over are exactly the people you don’t want to take over. It’s why we have elections so we can kick the bums out.
But, it seems that the bums never actually LEAVE! They just hang around, kibitzing from behind, or else waiting for a chance to get back ‘in’, or else they become Lobbyist’s!
How ’bout a mob syndicate. But even the mob sometimes had honor among criminals.
The so-called ‘honor among criminals’ means they don’t steal from each other. Or, do they?
They’re like the IRS goons of 50 yrs ago. Remember?
That’s why the Democrats are wailing about the rogue agency being reined in; because they want to be able to shove their agenda down everyone’s throats.
They want to end-around any “struggle.”
They are all gangster organizations.
If you actually believe that these agencies do whatever the boss tells them to do, then you really do need to get out of your basement more often.
I can’t understand why so many have given this the thumbs down! Most of what Duane says is true.
Democrats just ignore the law, it’s a minor inconvenience, they’ll scheme round it.
Exactly. They’ll just issue and implement another, slightly reworded “rule”.
As a Natural Resource Explorer, my whole career, on Federal Lands, it is beyond belief how the Democrat Administrations have weaponized many government agencies. The insanity, for me, started with the Carter Administration declaring Roadless Study Areas, not allowing road repair within the area so designated, then, when the roads were impassible, declaring them to be Roadless Areas. Each Democrat Administration appears to be trying to outdo the prior ones, and now Mumbles Brandon has destroyed a healthy economy, alienated large segments of the population with defund the police nonsense, inflation, crime, recession, etc. Steve Milloy is good at calling out Junk Science, and he has a great future ahead of him as he is operating in a target rich environment.
You got that right. +50
Thanks, Steve. Excellent, detailed analysis, as always!
The actual endangerment is EPA and the puppeteers acting behind the scene, not CO2.
It was a minuscle question of pecking order. It changes nothing.
The only way to “stop them for good” is to dismantle the whole Quack Vatican along with the structures that created and encouraged it to begin with. While there is demand and supply of pervasive Lysenkoism, it will persist.
Then spray and set traps against return of Mugwumpery, then “science based policies” and corruption of the scientific institutions. The newly built ones.
Obviously, such turnabout is not anywhere near the same ballpark as the mummy of a former sovereign being used to spook one particularly feisty bunch of minions into knowing their place. But by now it’s at least on the horizon.
Can you provide a guide to all the metaphors you used?
Is the “mummy of a former sovereign” a dig at Biden, being a relic and puppet of the former Obama administration? Trotted out to scare the masses into climate orthodoxy?
POTUS after Roosevelt never had monarch grade power, it’s mostly a figurehead position. Which is why a lot of them were professional actors, of course. Trump’s little performance act demonstrated this fact by provoking the real powers to show their hands… so their hands are not “invisible” anymore, even for the mentally lazy.
SCOTUS was (and formally is) technically sovereign: they decide what the Constitution or any law “really means”, even if it happens to be clearly opposite of what the text plainly means, and they can overrule anybody, but nobody can overrule them, short of their own successors. See e.g. “An open letter to Ron Paul Supporters” by Mencius Moldbug.
But of course, US Supreme Court was defeated before (New Deal, for one). Not long ago it surrendered again, to the informal power structure and specifically The Press.
So what these abrupt moves lately may mean?
Maybe the best way to manage the EPA and the rest of the “Climate Change” scammers is to report on the actual temperature data from around the world that shows that it is NOT increasing!!!
See: http://temperature.global/
What exactly is this supposed to change? The frauds will realize that they are frauds? They know. Just about everyone knows.
How about returning to constitutionalism where the EPA is unauthorized until the people pass an amendment granting the Feds power concerning environmental protection. Plus it would hurt to admit that the Feds can’t just show up and order you to not use land you own without bringing their checkbook to buy it. The excuse, “We didn’t actually take the land,” has always been a sophistry used by bullies, and the Feds are the biggest bullies around.
Article I section 8: The congress shall have the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes,
The constitutional argument is always the commerce clause. Because air and water cross state lines, congress has the authority to regulate them.
It’s a solid constitutional argument. You might not like the policies invoked, but the authority to regulate is impossible to question.
Claiming that air crossing a state line constitutes “trade’ is pure sophistry.
It’s never been anything other than a power grab by those who want government to run everything.
So wind and rivers crossing State boundaries is commerce? When was that decided? If so, it could only be by the non-biologists who decided that bees are fish.
The Constitutional authority to regulate is possible to question. Commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services. The Feds can regulate buying of goods and services with foreign nations, Indian tribes, and among the states.
Air is not bought or sold, and water is not always bought or sold. In many cases, adjacent, and upstream and downstream states work out water rights among themselves, without involvement of the Federal government.
When the Constitution was written, air and water pollution was not an issue to be addressed. The commerce clause does not necessarily apply when the issue is not commerce.
The point of the Supreme Court decision is that the EPA cannot regulate CO2 because it wants to without a duly passed law that grants them that authority. Congress has never passed any law that addresses CO2 and global warming.
“The point of the Supreme Court decision is that the EPA cannot regulate CO2 because it wants to without a duly passed law that grants them that authority. Congress has never passed any law that addresses CO2 and global warming.”
Yes, that’s the heart of the matter. The EPA is assuming power it does not have. The Supreme Court says they cannot do that.
Then “the people” will pass an amendment. Even if Facebook will have to ban mentions of some statistical law again. Though probably without even that.
What way to stop them for good is that? The wooden stake through the heart is only effective in fiction.
Given their track record, we can expect the JoeBama WEF proxy regime to ignore this SCOTUS ruling along with all the others it has been ignoring and in fact double down on lawlessness.
Is there any body of elected politicians with the authority and the courage to impose any degree of oversight and try to get this country back under the rule of law? Don’t expect the Geldings On Prozac to step up any time soon.
Lawlessness is the hallmark of the corrupt Biden Administration.
This coming January, Republicans in Congress should impeach and remove Biden from office for dereliction of duty and for deliberately refusing to enforce U.S. laws.
Sure, Tom, in a just world Brandon SHOULD be impeached and removed. But as I’m sure you’re aware, since that requires 67 Senators, it’s never going to actually happen.
There could be video evidence of Brandon accepting cash bribes from the Chicoms and probably not one Demonrat Senator would vote to convict. So there would need to be a gain of 17 seats in the Senate, and that assumes that the Rhinos hold the line.
Three presidents have been impeached (A.Johnson, Clinton, Trump). None have been removed. All have been cases of partisan overreach.
It may still be useful to impeach him and air his crimes. But if the House impeaches, they should do so on truly serious charges such as bribery. As it is, the two charades pulled against Trump have already cheapened the sanction of impeachment to the point where it’s seen as an illegitimate witch hunt by half the country. In which case it’s fairly pointless since nobody will change their minds and there will never be a 2/3 majority to convict.
Political theater tends to backfire because the middle-of-the-roaders don’t like it.
Vladimir Putin couldn’t do a better job of wrecking the U.S. economy than the misguided, poorly informed, obstructionist naifs motivated by the lies of Bill McKibben, Michael R. Bloomberg, Jeremy Grantham, Rockefeller Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, Associated Press (Seth Borenstein), ABC, NBC, NPR, Pravda (a/k/a the New York Times), the WaPo, the La-La Times and the rest of the art history, sociology, English and poetry majors who are scientific and economic illiterates and innumerates.
Yes, dictators nowadays have it easy. All they have to do is sit back and watch their enemies destroy themselves with their delusions about reducing CO2 increases. Then the dictators can walk in and pick up the pieces.
Yeah, just sit back and watch a bunch of fools, obsessing over CO2, ruin their lives and livelihoods for no good reason.
It’s amazing how many fools have managed to get themselves into positions of power. We seem to be surrounded by them. This can’t be good.
Are they truly naifs and fools, or treacherous traitors?
California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta today called the Supreme Court’s decision “misguided and gravely disappointing.”
“We are running out of time in the fight against climate change, and we need all levels of government working together to take action before it’s too late,” he said in a statement. “In California, we have strong programs in place to address climate change, and we will not go backwards. With the future of our planet at stake, our commitment to tackling the climate crisis cannot waver.”
So much for his oath of office to protect and defend the constitution. I guess when you are appointed and not elected it isn’t as important to respect the rule of law.
“We are running out of time in the fight against climate change,”
He sounds so sure of himself. I guess most fanatics are sure of their delusions.
The truth is there is no evidence showing CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth. Alarmists are lying to you when they say we are in danger from CO2. They know no such thing. They are assuming something that is not in evidence. Assumptions are not evidence. Assertions are not evidence. The Alarmist have no evidence. Don’t believe them when they claim they do, because they are either sadly misinformed or they are lying to you because there is no evidence CO2 is bad for humanity.
The people who ran that scam are well known. A civil prosecution of such persons in a class action of people who lost their livelihood? Making them personally accountable may be the only way to stop the rot.
On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” White House national climate advisor Gina McCarthy said that the Supreme Court didn’t bar the EPA from pursuing President Biden’s climate goals and vowed, “we will see the transition to clean energy, regardless of the Supreme Court.” And that “We’re going to keep moving forward, even though the Supreme Court would like to look backwards and hold us back.”
McCarthy said the decision “did limit the ability of the EPA to use one section of the Clean Air Act in a way they had used to tackle the climate crisis. But it did not prevent them from acting in a regulatory way. And this president is fully committed to moving forward to tackle the climate crisis, and he’s using bold steps throughout the whole of government in order to get that done. And so, we will see the transition to clean energy, regardless of the Supreme Court.”
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/30/w-h-climate-adviser-mccarthy-well-transition-to-clean-energy-regardless-of-scotus-move-forward-even-if-they-want-to-hold-us-back/
Yes, the Biden Administration considers that the United States is in the transition to get off oil and gas, and are not looking to increase the production of oil, but are rather looking to decrease the production of oil and gas.
The Biden administration has effectively locked us into this position and the high gasoline prices and high inflation are just part of the process of transition to them. They don’t have much sympathy for the little guy whose takehome pay has taken a huge hit. Their “transition” is much more important than any one person.
The good news is this “transition” has shown a majority of Americans that they want no part of this stupidity and are going to make big changes after the coming November elections.
We’ll be lucky if the United States is not seriously crippled because of this delusional Biden presidency. Worst president evah!, and he’s not even halfway through his first term.
The new majority Republican Congress must rein this maniac in. He is a walking disaster for the nation.
You can’t build solar and wind when there is no solar and wind, except by increasing oil and gas.
The law of unintended consequences. To go green we must massively expand oil and gas production to build green technology.
It is not quite that simple and the result is rather amusing. EPA is still required to regulate CO2 under the terms of the Clean Air Act, but that Act provides no way to do that regulation. The Clean Power Plan attempted to expand an obscure minor clause in the Act to do the job but SCOTUS correctly ruled that the clause does not confer that kind of massive authority.
EPA is between a rock and a hard place. It should tell Congress that it cannot do the job and needs a new law, along the lines of the SO2 law added to the Act in 1990, curbing emissions. But such a law has zero chance of passing in the foreseeable future.
EPA is stuck. What they will now do is anybody’s guess. Enjoy their dilemma!
Rest assured, lawlessness will prevail. It is much easier to destroy than to build.
Article. I. Section. 1. of the U.S. Constitution says:“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”
Note that it does not mention EPA, FDA, BATFE or any of the other alphabet soup of federal agencies.
And as far as I can tell the Constitution does not authorize Congress to delegate legislative authority to any of those agencies. In my opinion those agencies should only be able to recommend rules to congress. But those rules should carry no legal effect unless enacted into law by Congress.
Unfortunately the court has allowed congress to delegate its authority in some cases to administrative agencies. That is an extremely dangerous ruling because it puts our lives under the control of unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucrats i.e. crooks.
The fascists/marxists bureaucraps (EPA or any of the 3-letter depts) don’t really pay much attention to the supreme court or laws in general. They’ll just continue doing what they have for decades — do what they want (like just issuing new, reworded directives), and if those are challenged, just depend on the corruption in the lower courts to uphold them. After a long time, maybe get to the supreme court, then repeat. There is no real respect for the law anymore in the US — look at the political prisoners still in jail after the Jan 6 thingy, and the completely ignored crimes/lies perpetrated by the dems trying to remove an elected president.
Nuke em from orbit?
Ya gotta love Kagan’s dissent. She essentially declared that the government was free to ignore the constitution because this is an emergency.
We haven’t heard from climate wack job St. Greta in awhile. Thought she’d be lecturing the Supreme Court on their EPA decision. Is the green movement dying?
Maybe Greta sees the handwriting on the wall.
Sweden joining NATO must be giving her sleepless nights.
Ya gotta love Kagan’s dissent.
From the penultimate page of that dissent :
Does anyone have contacts in a polling company who could add the following item to an upcoming survey in the good old US of A ?
Kagan seems to have a rather twisted view of the U.S. Constitution.
Congress writes laws and then the U.S. Supreme Court determines whether those laws conform with the U.S. Constitution. That’s it. The Supremes should not be in the business of creating “good policy”.
Kagan also declared something that is false: That CO2 is a danger that needs regulation. Kagan is allowing “hearsay”, posing as evidence, into her mental courtroom.
Judge Kagan, have you ever really seen any actual evidence that shows CO2 is a danger to humanity? I didn’t think so. So why are you declaring CO2 dangerous when all you have is hearsay and assumptions and assertions? You have no evidence, Judge Kagan, yet you imply there is evidence. It is the job of a judge to be able to distinguish between evidence, and assumptions and assertions. In the case of climate change, you have failed in this mssion.
You too, Judge Kagan, have been taken in by the human-caused climate change scam. You have been duped. One of these days you will feel real silly about this position you took. I hope it’s soon. That means less pain for the rest of us since if you wake up to reality, then maybe many others will, too and we will stop ruining ourselves with efforts to control CO2.
In solidarity, our energy policies should mirror the PRC and Imperial Russia. ; )
Given that the clean air plan was never implemented (since it was stopped by the courts before it came into effect and the abandoned by the Trump adminstration) it seems odd to
claim that “the Clean Power Plan helped send virtually the entire U.S. coal industry into bankruptcy, killed 50,000 high paying coal jobs and devastated coal industry dependent communities.“
The full quote from the ATL article …
It was the threat of implementing the CPP that “helped” eliminate investment in maintaining infrastructure that was threatened with closure “as soon as possible, because of the climate crisis / emergency” by executive branch agencies using arbitrary “powers” they had inferred from the scope of the laws Congress had actually managed to pass.
NB : The low cost (/ high volumes) of “fracked gas” that became available in the 2010s, and the inherent flexibility of CCGT power plants (very fast ramp-up and ramp-down times, resulting in excellent “demand following” characteristics), as well as CCGT having 50% lower CO2 emissions per MWh than coal, didn’t help either …
This is just the tip of the iceberg unfortunately and a battle won for the eco terrorists. In CO for example, utilities in cahoots with politically appointed boards and regulators used the likelihood of an imposed carbon tax as signaled by EPA’s bs as a key component of the sham cost justification and analysis concluding perfectly viable coal fired generation should be prematurely decommissioned. The Sierra Club lawyer types who concocted this reality denying house of reasoning cards are some of the most devious and dishonest people on the planet; wholly committed to their faux eco religion though and determine to win at all costs. Though they may have lost on this front, I guarantee they have dozens of others already opened up.