Posted on 03/01/2014 5:38:27 PM PST by Kaslin
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency. The case will determine how far EPA can extend its regulatory overreach, to control “climate changing” carbon dioxide from power plants and other facilities – by ignoring the Constitution’s “separation of powers” provisions, rewriting clear language in the Clean Air Act, and disregarding laws that require the agency to consider both the costs and benefits of its regulations and what it is regulating.
Put more bluntly, the Court will decide whether EPA may deceive and defraud the American people, by implementing regulations that have no basis in honest science and will be ruinous to our economy. It is the most important energy, economic and environmental case to come before the Court it in decades.
Suppose a used car dealership routinely rolled back speedometer mileage, deleted customer complaints from its website, posted fabricated compliments, and lied about defects and accidents. Or a manufacturer misstated its sales and bottom line, failed to mention major safety violations and fines, and made false claims about new product lines, to attract investors and inflate stock prices?
Both would be indicted for fraud. Now apply the same standards to EPA, whose actions and regulations will affect far more people: virtually every family, facility, business and community in the United States. Most jurors would rule that the agency is engaged in routine, purposeful deceit, dishonesty and fraud.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy insists there is “no more urgent threat to public health than climate change.” She is determined to impose President Obama’s anti-hydrocarbon agenda. “I just look at what the climate scientists tell me,” McCarthy told Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Translated, she means she talks only to those who advocate climate alarmism, and ignores all contrary scientists and evidence.
In fact, thousands of scientists and studies argue that there is no empirical, observational evidence to support any of her claims. Recent NOAA and NASA temperature data confirm that global warming ended in 1997 and continues today, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase steadily, improving plant growth worldwide. Seas are rising at barely seven inches per century, and there is no evidence that recent weather events are any more frequent, intense or “dangerous” than what mankind has dealt with forever.
There is no convincing evidence that carbon dioxide emissions have replaced the powerful, complex, interrelated natural forces that have always driven climate and weather changes. No evidence supports the notion that slashing CO2 emissions and trashing our economy will “stabilize” global temperatures and climate variations, or that developing countries will stop pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
EPA brushes all this aside, just as crooked car dealers and manufacturers reinvent the truth to sell their shoddy products. The agency just assumes and asserts human causes and disastrous results, disregards any and all experts and evidence to the contrary, and ignores any and all costs imposed by its regulations.
It has also violated the Constitution and rewritten specific Clean Air Act provisions that specify 250 ton-per-year emission limits, in sections EPA is relying on for its climate rulemakings. To target and shut down coal-fired power plants, the agency arbitrarily raised the threshold to 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, and ignored the fact that in 692 bills Congress never contemplated applying these sections to greenhouse gases. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, EPA will continue rewriting the law, tightening its standards to control millions of natural gas generators, refineries, cement kilns, factories, paper mills, shopping malls, apartment and office buildings, hospitals, schools and even large homes.
EPA and other agencies have paid out billions in taxpayer dollars to finance “research” making ludicrous claims that manmade global warming is hidden in really deep ocean waters or obscured by small volcanic eruptions or pine tree vapors – and that tens of thousands of offshore wind turbines could weaken hurricanes and reduce storm surges. They have used “climate disruption” claims to justify giving eco-activist groups billions of taxpayer dollars to promote alarmist climate propaganda … spending tens of billions on crony-corporatist “green energy” and “climate resilience” programs … and forcing the United States and other nations to spend hundreds of billions on worthless climate change prevention capers.
EPA’s so-called “science” is intolerable “secret science.” The agency refuses to share it with outside experts or even members of Congress and businesses impacted by its regulations. The agency claims this taxpayer-funded information is somehow “proprietary,” even though it is being used to justify onerous regulations that dictate and impair our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards and life spans. EPA refuses to be transparent because it wants to prevent any examination of its internal machinations.
Just as bad, EPA routinely ignores its own scientific standards, and the climate reports it relies on come straight from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, as the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrowobserved in its amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in this case, the IPCC has been caught red-handed presenting student papers, activist press releases and emailed conjecture as “peer-reviewed expert reports.” It has been caught deleting graphs that clearly showed its computer models were worthless, and employing models like the one that generated Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” to support assertions that it is 95% certain that humans are causing climate change chaos.
The agency’s computer models have never been “validated” and are not merely “unverifiable.” They are flat-out contradicted by real-world evidence right outside the EPA windows, making their results worthless for sound, legitimate public policy.
In violation of federal laws and executive orders, EPA hypothesizes, concocts or exaggerates almost every conceivable carbon “cost” – to agriculture, forestry, water resources, coastal cities, human health and disease, ecosystems and wildlife. But it completely ignores even the most obvious and enormous benefits of using fossil fuelsand emitting plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide: affordable heat and electricity, jobs, transportation, better crop growth and nutrition, and improved living standards, health and welfare.
In reality, hydrocarbon and carbon dioxide benefits outweigh their alleged costs by as much as 500 to 1! That means EPA’s “climate change mitigation” rules impose costs on society that exceed even EPA’s exaggerated regulatory benefits by as much as 500 to 1.
And let’s not forget that one of Ms. McCarthy’s senior advisors devising the agency’s climate change policies and regulations was none other than John Beale – the guy who bilked us taxpayers out of $1 million in salary and travel expenses for his mythical second job as a CIA agent. To suppose his fraudulent actions did not extend to his official EPA duties defies belief. And yet EPA has apparently taken no steps to reexamine Beale’s analyses or conclusions.
EPA has done all of this knowingly, deliberately, with full knowledge of the grossly deficient foundations of its pseudo-science and policies – to drive an anti-hydrocarbon agenda, without regard for the consequences inflicted on millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide.
This goes beyond mere sloppiness or incompetence. It is dishonest. It violates the law. According to the standards applicable to every citizen and business in the land, it is fraudulent. And while ObamaCare affects one-sixth of economy, by controlling the energy that powers our homes, cars, businesses and nation, EPA’s carbon and carbon dioxide policies will control and impair 100% of our economy, and kill tens of millions of jobs – for no environmental benefits.
The real threat to public health and welfare is not climate change. It is EPA and what this rogue agency is doing in the name of preventing climate change. If the Supreme Court allows this, the battle will be joined on countless other fronts, because voters are sick and tired of being lied to, manipulated, defrauded, and forced to pay the heavy price for mountains of oppressive regulations.
Democrats say they plan to use climate change to attack Republicans in 2014. I say, Bring it on!
Eventually.
Will the Supreme Court Permit EPA Fraud?
Sure! Why not? They’re on a roll.
The EPA has been sitting on the development of the largest copper ore body in North America. Resolution Copper has been trying to develop one of the mines I used to work in at the town I grew up in.
If necessary, Roberts will get his marching order from the Regime.
These legal guidelines, until recently, meant something.
The rules are meant to prevent arbitrary, capricious and unfounded "science" rules and actions.
I'm assuming that the Supreme Court hasn't yet been totally compromised by the Obama-Soros plan for the Total Transformation of the United States of America.
Who is still clueless enough to put any faith in the courts??
The Court will decide whether the EPA and thus the President has total power or not quite total power. This has ramifications far beyond the already tyrannical powers of federal agencies and the Executive Branch.
The EPA declared that a natural occurring gas (CO-2) is a “pollutant” - I call that “arbitrary, capricious,” and an ignorant lie. If the SCOTUS goes along with this crap, there truly is no hope for We the People through any of our 3 branches of the Federal Government. If ever an agency deserved to be dissolved, this is a prime example - We have Nixon to thank for this federal over-reach. Geeeez - anyone who wants to be POTUS should just be committed to an insane asylum.
Roberts has been the most overt sellout in high office that I can think of. I understand that Roberts takes Dilantin for siezure control. I took that stuff for 12 years. One effect was the near total disappearance of my will power. Finally getting off the Dilantin restored that.
I’ll pray you are right. But I won’t bet money on it.
Correction. Roberts ALREADY GOT his marching orders from the Regime. These scum bags are bought and paid for. The 64 dollar question is: what will change this?
There are 4 so call Judges on the Supreme Court that would vote is was legal to put in jail anyone that goes against the Democrat Party agenda. What chance do we of getting anything rules in our favor?
Go with the no hope. The SCOTUS already ruled in 2007 that CO2 is a pollutant and can be regulated by the EPA. The decision was narrowly centered on new automobiles, but the precedent has been set for the SCOTUS to go for giving blanket authority.
I didn’t know that - I thought that happened under Obama. Yup, we are doomed....
As a side note to constitutionally forcing the three federal branches to comply with its constitutionally liimited powers, please consider the following. A former Arizona federal Representative had proposed a bill which would have required the HoR to reference constitutional clauses to substantiate that Congress had the constitutional authority to make a given bill. I understand that the bill met with limited success however, a Senate version now being ignored.
Such an amendment should also require the Supreme Court to include the calendar year in which a case was decided in all references to previous cases in a case opinions. The date would help concerned citizens to be on their guard concerning cases decided after FDR's activist justices wrongly rewrote constitutional history, sweeping the 10th Amendment under the carpet in the 1940s.
Regarding the EPA, for example, the Court would be required to indicate that the first major constitutional conflict is that the states have never delegated to Congress, via the Constitution, the specific power to address environmental issues.
The second major constitutional problem with the EPA relates to the first problem as follows. Even if the states had delegated to Congress the specific power to regulate environmental issues, the Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress. So Congress has a constitutional monopoly on federal legislative powers whether it wants it or not.
So by establishing constitutionally undefined federal agencies like the EPA, Congress is wrongly protecting federal legislative powers from the wrath of the voters in blatant defiance of Sections 1-3 indicated above.
Souter’s fault.
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