The Bureaucrats Prepare For Cutting Your Power

The hot air activists shown in the picture are the shock troops for the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA is a mass of dedicated enviro-nuts who have managed to get power of unimaginable proportions in a few short decades. Having gotten CO2 (carbon dioxide) declared a dangerous greenhouse gas over which they have near absolute control, they have prepared a huge set of C02 regulations set to go into effect on January 2, 2011.

Despite years of relying on junk science and debunked theories supported by jury-rigged "hockey stick" graphs and outright fraud, the EPA will begin regulating CO2 emissions from power plants. It will have a devastating effect on all power plants fired by fossil fuels, but most of all could destroy the coal industry which provides nearly half of the electricity America needs. The EPA has done some very good things, but there was plenty of elected government oversight, and cleaning up America's air and water were worthy goals.

But like all gigantic bureaucracies, the EPA quickly lost sight of its intended goals, and instead sought to perpetuate and expand its own power and ignore the will of the people and the nature of the real world. Hare-brained schemes abound, and reasonable goals have gone the way of the dodo, to be replaced by magic schemes of "renewable energy." The agency heads have come to believe that all they have to do is announce an outrageous goal with a short compliance date, and technology will suddenly be able to do what it couldn't do the day before at a price that is no burden whatsoever.

Fossil fuels are a particular target since they produce large amounts of CO2 emissions (which are not nearly so dangerous or climatologically damaging as the ecofreaks would have us believe). But pictures of coal-fired power plants spewing black smoke into the air have become both ubiquitous and dishonest propaganda for the EPA. No fuel that is at all viable as a major power source is completely emission-free. Coal powered plants have become amazingly clean compared to the smoke-belching horrors depicted in the agitprop, and today's plants are not Birmingham, England in 1890.

The alternatives to coal and oil power are few, and even fewer are close to being viable within a short period of time. Nuclear power plants are the one proven alternative, and it takes considerable time to build them, more time to get approval of environmental impact reports from the EPA, and there are inherent dangers in them. The no nukes crowd has been relatively quiescent of late, but discuss nuclear plants, and the movement will immediately spring back to life. Wind-power produces very little power, takes up immense amounts of room, and is very cost-ineffective. Solar power has its small niche but is decades away from practical use as a major producer of power.

Bureaucrats have absolutely no conception of the interaction between what is viable, what may some day become viable, and what is necessary and tolerable in the meantime. Anything that burns is, in their mind, toxic, and therefore must be eliminated entirely regardless of its effect on the economy and the production of energy. The goal of cleaning up the air and the water has been replaced by the concept of immediate absolute purity. CO2 has been targeted as the engine that causes climate change (formerly global warming) and must be done away with forthwith. I wouldn't be surprised to see the EPA try to regulate human exhaling, since it is a major source of C02 production. Too much oxygen or nitrogen can be deadly, but only CO2 has been made the source of all environmental evil.

There is absolutely no legitimate scientific support for the regulation of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Even the law appears to be against the regulation since the Clean Air Act does not authorize it. Only the complicity of an administration that loves bureaucracies and a Congress unwilling to do its job have allowed the EPA to become an evil empire of its own. Even the leviathan agency has admitted that if all its goals were reached, it would reduce the temperature of the earth by only fifteen ten-thousandths of a degree over the course of an entire century.

Still, the agency will try to go forward with its regulations in the new year. One goal is to reduce the ambient air-quality standard for ground-level ozone (smog) from 75 parts per billion to between 60 and 70 parts per billion. That may not sound like much, but in fact it's a 9.3% to 20% decrease, something that it took five decades to do previously. The reduced power-production and the horrific monetary effects this attempt would produce would be unacceptable in a robust economy. Doing it now is a guarantee of economic chaos.

Too many solid conservatives have been so involved in stopping the Cap and Trade money-making scheme that they haven't noticed that the only difference between Al Gore and the EPA is that the EPA can accomplish its goals without Congressional oversight or immense profits for Gore and his cronies. The result, however, could be as bad, or even worse. Profiteers are more easily stopped than zealots who have made earth-worship into a form of radical religion for which they are willing to sacrifice everything (except themselves).

There is a solution. I don't know if the Republican takeover of the House is enough, and may require adding the Senate and the White House to stop this juggernaut. As it stands, Congress (with the assent of the White House) has allowed the EPA to implement its "endangerment rule," which gives the EPA the power to decide which gases must be regulated for the "public good" without permission from elected representatives. This is a complete and probably unconstitutional delegation of power. A new Congress could simply enact legislation which eliminates the endangerment rule and therefore automatically removes the EPA's power to regulate without Congressional permission and oversight. With the power of the purse that rests solely with the House, a major monkey-wrench could be thrown into the EPA machinery by simply de-funding their major projects.

Fossil fuels currently light up 85% of America's power plants. It's a legitimate goal to reduce that percentage over the next decades as alternate forms of energy become viable and come on line. But to allow one agency to high-handedly and unrealistically wave its collective hand and say "abracadabra, we don't need coal, oil and natural gas anymore" is nothing short of insanity. A bureaucrat can't use a bathroom without twenty pages of regulatory rules. How can we expect a nation to survive having its entire energy policy run by people like that?

Unrelated note: I have not forgotten that today is Pearl Harbor Day. We should remember our honored dead and at the same time remember that for America, that day became a national day of dedication to victory. It's a concept that has become very scarce in America today.