EPA to regulate CO2 with or without congressional authorization

November 9, 8:55 PMWashington County Independent ExaminerDavid Dick

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                   (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to implement strenuous new regulations regarding carbon dioxide emissions without authorizing legislation from congress.

Friday, the EPA sent its final proposal on CO₂ emissions to the White House for review. The exact contents of this proposal is as of now unknown. If it follows earlier EPA assessments, which it most likely will, then the EPA will assert its power to regulate and cut CO₂ emissions regardless of whether Cap and Trade becomes law or not.

The EPA justifies this by claiming that CO₂ is a pollutant. This is down right nuts considering that there must be CO₂ in the atmosphere for life to exist on the planet. Carbon dioxide is plant food and plants really like it. If plants aren't fed, neither are we, since everything we eat is either a plant or something that ate plants or something that ate something that ate plants. Ultimately, the entire food chain rests on vegetable matter.

Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activity is blamed for global warming. This is equally nuts since human activity accounts for only about five percent of the annual CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere. The other 95 % comes from natural sources including volcanoes, chemical erosion of rocks, and animal exhalation. It is not likely that the five percent of CO₂ emissions attributable to human activity is adding appreciably to any greenhouse effect.

But most intriguing of all is the apparent assumption that the earth's climate is a constant and should be expected to remain stable for centuries. This is flat out wrong. The earth's climate has been changing since the has been a climate that can change – that is, once an atmosphere developed the climate has been changing.

Sometimes it gets warmer than it is now, as it did in the Roman Warming which lasted from 250 BC to 450 AD. Sometimes it gets colder than it is now, as it surely was when glaciers covered half the planet 10,000 years ago. Occasionally the change can be quite dramatic and rapid as it did when the earth's climate dropped five degrees Celsius in about 25 years around 1300 heralding what is called the Little Ice Age. Currently the planet is in the midst of a 120 year warming trend. Knowing all that, it is hard to get excited about a warming of a mere one degree Celsius projected for the next 100 years.

But the EPA is having a tizzy fit over this small and gradual change, as if change like this is unprecedented and unbelievably rapid and traumatic. This is just not true and even a casual study of geology will tell you otherwise.

But most disturbing of all is the EPA's presumption that it has the power to issue new regulations for CO₂ emissions without enabling legislation from congress. If the EPA gets away with this power grab then you will be paying more for electricity, gasoline, your new car – just about everything you purchase.

You will pay more because business and industry will have to spend more to comply with new EPA regulations and businesses will pass that increased cost down to you in the form of higher prices. All because the EPA has been infected by the Henny Penny virus and believes that the sky is falling.

Shouldn't decisions like this originate in congress?

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