Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are lawyers in the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco office. They are also married to each other. Williams and Zabel are Global Warming “true believers”. They’ve done the research, and they think the Waxman-Markey-Boxer-Kerry Cap and Trade scheme is a very bad idea.
So they wrote a position paper for the website www.carbonfees.org. They wrote an editorial that was published in The Washington Post.
And they made the following video:
Even though Iron Eyes Cody, the Crying Indian, was a fake, he had a point: America in the 60’s had become a nasty place. You used to see people throw all kinds of litter out of their cars; nowadays the only socially-acceptable forms of automotive litter are cigarette butts and dirty diapers. No longer do babbling brooks foam from phosphates. Emissions from cars and coal plants are cleaner, making it easier for all of us to breathe. For this, the EPA deserves at least some of the credit.
But the EPA has become the type-section for bureaucratic mission creep. Not content with a reasonable balance between economic growth and environmental impact, the EPA has followed the First Commandment of Bureaucracies: Expand the Mission. Or, rather, Expand the Budget by Expanding the Mission.
It would be one thing if they confined themselves to regulating dangerous pollutants and species that would actually be missed if extinct. Instead, the environmental extremists within the agency have set their sights on eliminating any human activity that has a measurable impact on the natural environment, no matter how negligible.
They have declared the polar bear “threatened”, with the polar bear population is at its maximum in recent history, in order to block any commercial development of the North Slope of Alaska, including offshore.
Carbon dioxide, essential for life on our planet, has been declared a dangerous pollutant, subject to EPA regulation.
Now, in the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, the EPA is blocking new coal permits in Appalachian Coal Country because of supposed negative impact on the population of mayflies.
(H/T: Instapundit) I am honestly surprised to find that there are people surprised by this.
Among those clamoring for attention and payouts from Motors Liquidation Co., the company that assumed General Motors’ unwanted assets after its Chapter 11 filing, are the environmental and economic redevelopment departments of state governments. According to reports, when GM exited bankruptcy, its polluted factory and land sites were consumed by the Motor Liquidation, allowing the automaker to avoid the responsibility of cleaning up its mess, and state leaders fear there won’t be any money to clean the locations.
After all, this was the original point of the exercise. GM was an unsustainable, debt-ridden mess; the government takeover and bankruptcy was designed to let it cut out the most diseased portions of its operations and reorganize as something more… ‘untainted,’ as it were. Or possibly even just ‘less tainted.’ That this ends up with individual state governments left holding the bag on the cleanup* is either an unintended consequence, or just a previously-obscure detail, of the bailout/bankruptcy; it all depends on whether you see the administration as a collection of dangerous idiots, or as a collection of dangerous idiots. A federal bailout of the state governments’ obligations to clean up a private industry’s ecological mess would certainly be a useful weapon in the federal government’s ongoing quest for ever-more power and oversight.
On the other hand, the White House can’t even spell “Barack Obama” reliably on official state documents, so it’s entirely possible that they stuck already-struggling states with the cleanup bill by the sheerest accident.
If you don’t have time to read this letter from Rep. Joe Barton, or watch the video below:
…let me summarize:
It goes like this (H/T & links via Ed Driscoll and OpenMarket.org).
A memo from the EPA surfaced a while back that mentioned in passing that regulating greenhouse gasses to the extent desired by the most fervent global warming believers might have an adverse effect on the impious, too:
In contrast, an endangerment finding under section 202 may not be not the most appropriate approach for regulating GHGs. Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the CAA for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities. Should EPA later extend this finding to stationary sources, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulatory programs such as New Source Review.
As this was somewhat alarming, once you translated it into Standard English, the White House eventually started a little pushback that no, they wouldn’t be junking the entire American economy just quite yet. So far, so good: after all, you don’t need to be a conservative to know that the government produces a lot of unfortunately relevant documents that later have to be eliminated and/or repudiated*.
I was going to rip into Rep Steve King (R, IA-05) for tossing out a 9 minute YouTube of RFK Jrs’ testimony where he stated that hog farmers were a greater threat than Osama bin Laden. It’s great that Rep King has a channel, but 9 minutes?
Then I watched it.
My God.
My God.
If you ever thought that having this lunatic running the EPA was a good idea, do the Republic a favor and burn your voter registration card before you do any real damage with it.
Crossposted on Moe Lane.
