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Alaska Joins 20 States Suing Biden Administration Over Highway Emissions Rules

Credit: Ward Clark

It's always a bit bemusing, writing about the supposed dangers of a warming climate while sitting in a small office building in the Susitna Valley. At the moment there are two feet of snow on the ground, more on the way, and temperatures are expected to plunge into double-digits below zero in the next few days. If you talk to Alaskans, many of us would agree, much as we love the winters in the Great Land, that sometimes a little bit of climate change would be welcome.

Instead, we are dealing with Washington trying to jam yet more rules down our throats to combat this issue. Alaska has joined 20 other states in filing suit to stop the latest insanity.

Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor and his counterparts in 20 other states are suing the Biden Administration over new highway emissions rules requiring state transportation departments to set and meet reduction targets for carbon dioxide — and to report their results to the federal government. 

The Federal Highway Administration rule, effective Jan. 8, is part of President Joe Biden’s climate change regime.

Atmospheric CO2 is the primary carbon source and is a building block for life on the planet. An over abundance of it can act as a greenhouse by absorbing infrared radiation and holding warmth.

Congress has not given the federal government authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the complaint says. 

You can view the entire complaint here.

The problem is that the Biden administration and indeed the Executive Branch in general has no authority to order this. The lawsuit, while lengthy and couched in a lot of legalese, is taking a lot of pixels to encode the proper reply of these states to the Biden administration, which reply would end with the phrase "...and the horse you rode in on." Congress has passed no legislation authorizing this requirement, and arguably, the Constitution forbids it; setting rules for the states on CO2 emissions is not among the enumerated powers granted the national government in the Constitution, and the 10th Amendment, therefore, prohibits them from making any such rule or indeed passing any such legislation.

Of course, the federal government has been using the 10th Amendment as toilet tissue since about 1850, so there's that.

It's even more egregious when the proposed rules are over something this nonsensical, though. President Reagan once said of the left that they “…know so many things that just aren’t so,” and climate change is one of those. Sure, climates do change, and have, constantly, throughout the Earth’s 4.55 billion year history. In fact, over the great majority of that long, long history, the planet was a lot warmer than it is now. As recently as 15 million years ago, in the Sangamonian Interglacial, North America was a much warmer place, and probably a pretty pleasant one. If you had a time machine and were looking for a place in the past to settle, the Sangamonian would be a good one, weather-wise – with some mastodon hunting thrown in, along with the odd saber-toothed cat. I wouldn't mind having a go at a mastodon or a saber-tooth myself — preferably with a good rifle and at a safe distance.

Once again, with sketchy information on enormously complex, chaotic, and poorly understood systems, the Left is pushing policies that would be ruinous for the global economy. Like these proposed and likely illegal highway rules.

Alaska is in good company:

States suing Biden are Kentucky, South Dakota, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

I'll keep saying it: I'll start believing there's a climate crisis when the people who keep telling me there's a climate crisis start acting like there's a climate crisis.

FLASHBACK! See more recent RedState coverage on the climate change debate at these links:

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