Posted on 08/05/2015 10:53:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as "burning the Constitution."
As his presidency wanes, Obama is desperately burnishing his eco-credentials with environmental zealots like Pope Francis and the leftists at the U.N. and in the European Union. But here at home, his plan would be a disaster economically, which explains its failure in Congress. Hillary Clinton is pledging to support the plan, while Republicans vying for their party's presidential nomination are vowing to oppose it. The Clean Power Plan will be a fiercely debated issue in coal-consuming swing states like Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania -- where the race for the White House is usually decided.
Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is imposing the Clean Power Plan on all 50 states, requiring each state to close down coal-burning electric plants, and shift to other sources of electricity -- natural gas burning plants, nuclear plants, solar and wind-power generators -- in order to reduce carbon emissions by one third. Nationwide, about 40 percent of electric power is produced by coal plants. Forcing these utilities to close will burn consumers with higher electric bills. It will also send hundreds of thousands of jobs a year up in smoke, as employers pay more to operate their businesses, according to Heritage Foundation economists.
And for what? The purported benefit is to avoid an imperceptible 0.02 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by the year 2100. That's the official EPA estimate of the benefits of this Clean Air Plan. You must be kidding.
That's what as many as 25 governors are saying, and they are expected to file a lawsuit challenging the plan. They've got a strong case. Although the EPA bases its authority on the Clean Air Act of 1970, nothing in that law authorizes the agency to do more than require plants to use the best available technology -- like scrubbers -- to reduce emissions. Congress never authorized the EPA to force states to close coal plants and move on to nuclear, or wind and solar. "The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation's electric generating system," says Tribe. "It does not."
Defenders of the president's environmental agenda say he has to act alone because the Congress is gridlocked. That's untrue. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are against the plan, and for good reasons.
Obama's EPA has tried several end runs around Congress, creatively interpreting the 45-year-old Clean Air Act to suit its agenda. But it hasn't always gotten away with it. In a stinging U.S. Supreme Court rebuke against the administration's restrictions on mercury emissions, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "it is not rational, never mind 'appropriate' to impose billions of dollars in economic costs" when the benefits are so uncertain.
The same could be said for the plan announced on Monday. Defenders of the new regulation predict falling energy costs from renewable sources, but so far that is pie in the sky speculation. Like the president's prediction that the average family would save $2,500 because of Obamacare.
But long before the Supreme Court weighs in on this new plan, presidential politics is likely to determine its fate. Another example of how high the stakes are in 2016.
Give Caliph Baraq and the Mob credit.
They have made the concept of “lame duck” POTUS obsolete.
They are going full throttle while Republicans watch in awe...
I made nearly the same impact on the environment when I purchased a hotdog from a cart vendor...
..in other words, nearly zero!
I think its absurd that Obama has said that climate change is the biggest problem, greatest challenge, words to that effect, that we face today.
What about ISIS, aka ISIL, Islamic terror warfare in general?? What about continuing illegal immigration? What about thentue national debt? What about ongoing problems with obamacare? What about Social Security and Medicare going broke in the years ahead? What about continuing racial strife in our cities? What about crime?
Is global warming really a greater threat than any other problems we face??? Really????
Alright then, King Knute. Try and stop Winter from happening. Double Dog Dare you!!!
“Climate change” is the ultimate boogeyman, the monster in the closet, for the communists. It cannot be proven, or really disproven, with the state of our science. It can be “de facto” proven with bogus statistics and outright lies, for which the common man does not have the resources or knowledge to refute. For the same reason, “climate change” is also susceptible to never being “solved.” No matter what we do, they can still say “the monster is in your closet.”
"The sky is falling ...
"The Earth is doomed ...
"The science is settled ...
"I am the great mulatt-o-bama and I have spoken."
Early 2016.
Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden square off in the MSNBC hosted Debate #3
Moderator: Mrs. Clinton, you have expressed support for the President’s Clean Power Plan. (Hillary is shown nodding her approval of the Plan and the softball question that is sure to follow.) As you know this Plan will cost consumers 10’s of billions of dollars but will greatly improve our climate by the end of the century. (More Hillary nodding.)
Can you tell us what these improvements in our climate will be?
Mrs. Clinton: We will all be .02 degrees cooler. That’s almost .04 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.
Heard from the audience (99% liberals): “Isn’t she brilliant?”
It is but a tool in Obama’s agenda to destroy America.
It is about undermining our economy, energy production, and industry.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet!” - Al Jolson
repost.....
Back in July, I had a conversation with a person deep inside the EPA air quality business.
She said that the EPA received something like ten million comments on this rule. The sheer volume of the comments was far beyond the ability, the capacity, of EPA to handle.
EPA has a large body of contractors and subcontractors in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. All, that is every one, of the contractors was employed for three months sorting, reading then classifying the comments. Each comment might have several subjects and each of those subjects had to be entered under the proper classification on the monstrous spread sheets that were created. Dealing with the comments required other work to be put aside until the comments glut was dealt with.
Yesterday the EPA head said she had 4.7 million comments. my source says more like 10 million.
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a ball of fire that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
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