Bless The Beasts And The EPA

That adorable little critter eating the foliage in your garden is the banana slug. It's one of many creepy-crawlies living in abundance being protected by the Environmental Protection Agency. It eats, it breeds, yet serves no other known purpose. But it's cute, so let's call it "endangered."

That way nobody will consider doing something useful with the land it eats and breeds on in great numbers from Southern Alaska to San Diego. fact, it's so cute that the University of California at Santa Cruz chose it as the school mascot. In case you're not familiar with recent activities at UC Santa Cruz, Jews are a far more endangered species there than are banana slugs. But I digress. Alas and alack, the EPA seems to have located, identified and protected just about every ecologically useless or destructive animal in America. So unless they can find an even more obscure and useless fish than the Delta smelt (whose miserable existence is about to cause the extinction of another species, the California farmer), they have to move on to other things. And move on is exactly what the EPA is doing.

With the assistance of the greenie-weenie Obama administration, and the guidance of the Great Goracle and his billion dollar carbon offset scam, the EPA is poised to usurp the prerogatives of the elected branches of government and regulate greenhouse gases. The EPA has particularly decided that Carbon Dioxide is a deadly poisonous gas, which is solely produced by the human activities of greedy capitalists, and is causing global warming which is melting all the ice in the world (except the ice in the potent cocktails at D.C. parties).

In an attempt to fend off the EPA's egregious power-grab that is based on rapidly disintegrating junk science and doctored reports, eighteen state governors (as well as two American territorial governors) have had the effrontery to write a joint formal letter demanding that Congress rein in the EPA zealots. How dare these mere elected state officials think they might know a little more about their states' needs than a bunch of bureaucrats, crackpot politicos (Van Jones, anyone?), socialist self-aggrandizers, and for-profit pseudo-scientists in D.C.?

"As governors, we have the responsibility to protect jobs, promote economic growth and mitigate any threats to financial stability in our states. We oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases that fail to account for these responsibilities." How petty can they be? Imagine--weighing the very economic survival of their people against the airy-fairy pet theories of global warming/climate change enthusiasts. When will these backward-thinking self-centered stooges of capitalism realize they must sacrifice their old-fashioned ideas for the public good?

The governors weren't even particularly combative in the letter. They certainly didn't demand that all attempts to rid the air of pollutants cease immediately. They simply said: "The Agency is not equipped to consider the very real potential for economic harm when regulating emissions. Without that consideration, regulation will place heavy administrative burdens on state environmental quality agencies, will be costly to consumers and could be devastating to the economy and jobs." They want to know why Congress is so willing to surrender its oversight authority on behalf of job-killing schemes which are unproven and scientifically questionable and demonstrably quarrelsome (see EPA solar-power enthusiasts vs. EPA "save the lizards" enthusiasts in the California/Nevada deserts). Of course they wrote the letter to a Congress that actually took Cap and Trade seriously.

No taxation without representation was a rallying cry for the Revolutionary patriots. Perhaps today a good substitute is what the governors are saying--no regulation without representation. The governors are suggesting that such a massive delegation of power should never occur, but if it were to be done in a constitutional manner (if such a thing is even possible), then this is precisely the wrong time to be doing it.

One of the implications of the letter is that the governors represent their citizens, and that this is the same thing expected of the members of Congress. The hint is that any elected representative who ignores his or her constituents may not be long for this political world, given the economic crisis the entire nation is experiencing. Creating a few thousand "green jobs" that cost billions of dollars and take jobs away from far more workers than the plan creates is clearly not a viable alternative to being extremely cautious about implementing EPA restrictions that grossly restrict growth and seriously hamper major business and industrial activities.

The letter was signed by two Democratic governors (Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Steve Beshear of Kentucky), so it was not entirely partisan. I did not fail to notice that the signature of the governor of California was conspicuously absent from the letter. Our RINO governor is presiding over the worst economic calamity in California since the Great Depression, and the greatest mass exodus of businesses and taxpayers in its entire history. So naturally he supports the EPA's plans to make the air entirely pollutant free this very moment, and damn the effect on the jobs and economy of the state that is leading the rest of the nation off the tax-and-spend cliff.

Final question. Does anybody know how much greenhouse gas a few million munching, foliage-eating, slimy breeding banana slugs produce in a year? I don't.