Monday, May 18, 2015

The EPA Myth of "Clean Power"


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

8 comments:

Dan Pangburn said...

If you can understand the science that temperature change occurs as a transient in response to the time-integral of net forcing, you can discover that CO2 has no effect on climate.

Proof that CO2 has no significant effect on climate and identification of the two factors that do cause climate change (95% correlation since before 1900) are at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com

wildvortex said...

“Progressives” have long held the Declaration of Independence as legally unfettered from their view of a “living, breathing Constitution.” They commonly vilify the critical “endowment by our Creator.” There’s more to the moral, spiritual and philosophical basis of the Constitution than defining “inalienable rights.” In the Declaration there is also the chronicled history of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:”

These direct quotes from the Declaration of Independence need no further explanation.
• He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good (energy and monetary policy to destroy our economy and enrich his cronies and our enemies.).
• He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance (illegal immigration, maintaining the peace), unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly (bypassing Congress by Executive Orders, overturning initiatives voted overwhelmingly by the people – immigration policy, marriage under natural law between a man and woman.), for opposing with ‘manly’ firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within (Occupy anarchism, union thuggery, failure to enforce the borders, establishing a ‘civilian defense force as strong and well-funded as the military’)..
• He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands (Removing lands from resource exploration and development, draconian EPA and development regulations, minimum and prevailing wage demands to eliminate competition and compromise free enterprise).
• He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers (Appointing judges who have disdain for the Constitution, even though they solemnly swear to uphold it – in league with all too many elected and bureaucratic officials.).
• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance (Obamacare with its 159 new agencies and selective privileges in green, health, education, welfare and union venues).
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation: (Conspiring with international financial speculators and passing laws so complicated and indiscernible that they are loaded with special privileges, poison pills and bureaucratic license such as that being used to attack businesses, citizens, Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular No law should exceed one specific subject area or 100 pages in length, or it is by definition, pretended legislation.)
By applying Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Cloward and Pivens strategies, the Administration and its cronies are overwhelming the system with harassment, untenable regulations, creating dependency by a large segment of the population through ignorance of our laws, traditions and history and usurping the parental role and responsibility for raising children in favor of the state.

wildvortex said...

Thanks Dan There are three sites - actually many more where the truth is being exposed over the lies of the "progressives" and internationalists.
www.webcommentary.com
www.principia-scientific.org
http://www.newsmax.com/Insiders/LarryBell/id-228/
It's all about a one world government - not a global economy. They never learn.

Necromancer said...

Wonderful comments Dan Pangburn and wildvortex.Would you two mind if I copied this and emailed it around. I'll leave off names and handles.
"Semper Fi"

Dan Pangburn said...

Nec - emailing it around is fine with me; with or without names.

wildvortex said...

Go for it. We have a nation to save.

wildvortex said...

I thought I just said yes, but don't see it here. So, I agree with Dan.

Necromancer said...

Thank you Dan and wildvortex. I don't use my name here on Blogger and like it that way. I email Mr. Caruba every now and then if I really like something he posts. I spend most of my time on G+ and sometimes link his posts on that service. Not sure if the comments can be linked but no matter.