Today, the Environmental Protection Agency fired a fusillade at productive industry across the United States, and particularly several key industries in Louisiana:

Endangerment Finding: The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases–carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)–in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Cause or Contribute Finding: The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare.

Carbon dioxide, which every human being emits into the atmosphere each time we exhale, is now considered a pollutant by the Environmental Protection Agency and must be regulated by the federal government under the Clean Air Act.

This blog has been very outspoken in sounding the alarm about “cap and trade” policies and the ridiculous abuses of the federal government where energy policy is concerned.

Today’s developments are, quite simply, the worst ones yet with the Obama administration. This administration is now in a position to impose draconian, punitive regulations upon industries like power, oil and gas and petrochemical – upon which Louisiana depends – and virtually shut them down.

At a time when America is, alarmingly, beginning to import more and more gasoline from overseas thanks to the failure to adequately expand refinery capacity, EPA CO2 regulation will result in the destruction of current capacity as American refiners – a sizable percentage of which are based in Louisiana – will move offshore.

Ditto for the petrochemical industry.

Louisianians will see massive increases in electricity costs, and the state’s industrial sector will see a particularly harsh increase.

The construction industry in the state, and particularly industrial construction firms, will take a devastating blow from this. Engineering firms focusing on oil and gas and petrochemical work will find little market for their services. Vendors to petrochemical and manufacturing plants will be hit. The entire oil and gas industry will take a bath.

How bad could this be for Louisiana? How many jobs could it cost? Impossible to say at this point, but it is not unreasonable to say that we are staring into the abyss.

Louisiana senator David Vitter, in a release today, summed things up thusly:

U.S. Sens. David Vitter and John Barrasso today cautioned the White House regarding the implications of today’s finalized endangerment finding by President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other gases.

“Today the Obama administration formally declared carbon dioxide – something humans and animals exhale and plants and vegetation breathe in – as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act,” said Vitter. “By granting the EPA the ability to take unilateral action on this issue, the administration is risking further damage to the U.S. economy. The EPA’s decision may well result in a top-down, command-and-control approach that will add new mandates and could have a negative impact on almost every major sector of our economy. In the end, American families will pay for the cost of this decision in their utility bills, merchandise at stores and food items at the grocer.”

“The EPA’s actions say they are more interested in international opinion than saving American jobs,” said Barrasso. “The EPA is playing politics with people’s jobs during a recession, and that is just wrong.”

Last week, Vitter and Barrasso joined U.S. Reps. Darrell Issa and James Sensenbrenner on a letter to U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to request that the agency conduct a thorough investigation into the questions raised as a result of the disclosure of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. Many of these emails have raised questions about the use of these scientists’ data in their experiments and scientific investigations related to global warming.

“Some of the emails that have come to light involved a number of climate change scientists and other institutions that have played a pivotal role in the development of the U.N.’s official climate change policies, to include those relating to greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide,” Vitter said. “These emails have raised serious questions about these policies, and we asked that the EPA look further into this situation. To date, we have received no response, yet the administration is pressing ahead with this new endangerment finding despite evidence suggesting that some of the climate change data may have been manipulated. I fear that politics may be overriding policy when it comes to this important issue.”

Louisiana’s other senator, Mary Landrieu, has not issued a statement about the EPA finding. Instead, she signed on to an op-ed piece that ran on The Politico and a few other places extolling the virtues of natural gas (strong stance, there).

We are in major trouble here. The EPA must be stopped before it destroys the economy of our state along with the nation at large WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A VOTE. The only word to describe this move is tyranny.

It is imperative that Congress pass HR 391, written by Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which amends the Clean Air Act to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases or to attempt to engineer the global climate.

Cross-posted at the brand-spanking-new TheHayride.com