Climategate Will Now Hit the EPA (PJM Exclusive)

ClimateGate Fraud and facts be damned, EPA is going to shove more ethanol down our throats
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Thread posted by Nachum:
E.P.A. Says It Expects to Raise Amount of Ethanol Allowed in Fuel Blends to 15%
NY Times ^ | 12/2/2009 | MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that it would probably increase the amount of ethanol that gasoline retailers could blend into ordinary fuel, to 15 percent, if tests established that the blend would not damage cars.

The maximum ethanol blend is now 10 percent, except for cars specially equipped to handle higher blends. The agency said it was likely to approve the increase to 15 percent next summer, perhaps for use only in cars of the 2001 model year and later.

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Post # 11 from Freeper Tarpon in linked THREAD

Why sure, even the California CARB says ethanol produces 2.5 times the CO2 than does plain old gasoline. Before Schwarzenegger made them take it down.

And according to the US Governments EIA the USA has more fossil fuel resources than any other nation ... So we have to do something to get the prices up for Americans — Don’t you understand, it’s so unfair.
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And Post 19 from Freeper Fred Hayek:

With the exception of FlexFuel vehicles, running on a greater than 10% ethanol blend will void manufacturers’ warranties.

To err is human, but it takes a government to really **** things up.

THREAD

Thanks penelopesire. Thought you might like a good chuckle from snippets of Ann Coulter if you haven’t already read her column on the subject... :-)

DO SMOKING GUNS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING, TOO?
December 2, 2009

As we now know (and by “we” I mean “everyone with access to the Internet”), the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has just been caught ferociously manipulating the data about the Earth’s temperature.

(snip)

Having claimed to have collected the most complete data on the Earth’s temperature for the last half century, the CRU’s summary of that data was used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its 2007 report demanding that we adopt a few modest lifestyle changes, such as abolishing modern technology, reverting to hunter/gatherer status and taxing ourselves into servitude.

(snip)

Liberals won’t tell us why Congress passed a law outlawing incandescent lightbulbs by 2014 — a bill solemnly delivered to the president in a Prius hybrid (making it the slowest-moving bill in U.S. history). Instead, they tell us there’s a “scientific consensus” that we have to use fluorescent lightbulbs or we’ll all die.

(snip)

Even if the Earth were warming — which apparently it is not — the idea that humans using energy-efficient lightbulbs would alter the temperature of the globe is approximately as plausible as the Aztecs’ belief that they were required to wrench the beating heart out of living, breathing humans in order to keep the sun on its path.

Sadly, the “human sacrifice deniers” lost the argument to Aztec CRU scientists, who explained that there was a “scientific consensus” on the benefits of ritual murder.

But at least the Aztecs only slaughtered tens of thousands of humans in the name of “climate change.” The global warming cultists want us all dead.

http://www.anncoulter.com/

“First Environmental Laws

Perhaps the leading model for would-be environmental public interest attorneys during this period was the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which pioneered the idea of using test cases — specific examples of racial injustice — to illustrate the larger inequity of race relations in America, and to establish useful legal precedents for bringing needed reforms. The NAACP had won a series of historic cases, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which had struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had allowed segregation in schools until then.

But while the NAACP had the equal rights provision of the 14th Amendment on which to base its cases, environmental lawyers had nothing comparable. Applicable statutes were few, and principles of common law — including nuisance, trespass, and strict liability — were difficult to apply because they had evolved to protect individual property rather than broad public interests.

This state of affairs soon changed. As the decade drew to a close, environmental concerns that had been building throughout the 1960s swept to the top of the nation’s political agenda, and on New Years Day, 1970, President Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Among other things, it required that federal agencies conduct thorough assessments of the environmental impact of all major programs. (This provision, duplicated ultimately at state and local levels across America, remains a cornerstone of environmental law.)

Then came Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when massive rallies took place on virtually every college campus in America and in most large cities. TV and magazines gave the events extensive coverage, and both houses of Congress stood in recess in honor of the occasion.

With the president’s basic approval, and public opinion loudly and clearly expressed by the Earth Day demonstrations, legislators in Washington and in state capitols and city halls across the nation in the early 1970s passed thousands of new environmental laws and ordinances. At the federal level, in addition to NEPA, the most important laws were the 1970 amendments to several pieces of “clean air” legislation dating back to 1963 (laws that collectively became known as the Clean Air Act), and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, commonly known as the Clean Water Act. From these laws there evolved a large body of environmental case law. Subsequent federal legislation, notably the Consumer Product Safety Act (1972), the Environmental Pesticide Control Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), the Superfund legislation to clean up hazardous waste sites (1980), and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (1986) added to the rising edifice of environmental statutes, and the lawyers who filed cases citing these laws created a huge annex of legal precedents.

Environmental lawyers who prior to 1970 had worried about the barrenness of their legal arsenal now found themselves armed with an abundance of new statutory weapons. The challenge was no longer to adapt principles of common law to environmental issues or dust off old, little-used statutes, but rather to monitor the administration of new statutes by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), itself a creation of the Nixon administration, and when necessary to prod the agency and test the laws by filing lawsuits.

Putting the Laws to Work

Two key environmental public interest law firms emerged from this productive period. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was formed in 1967 as an outgrowth of a lawsuit brought by Long Island citizens to restrain the use of DDT by the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) started in 1970 as the result of a partnership between a group of young, idealistic Yale Law School students and the older New York “establishment” attorneys of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, led by Stephen Duggan, who had already incorporated under the NRDC name.

Since then, environmental lawyers have achieved great strides for the environment by using the legal means at their disposal to clean up rivers, decrease air pollution, ban toxic substances, force government and industry to comply with regulations, and even to prod the U.S. to participate in international negotiations on global climate change issues. And environmental law is so firmly established, it is taught as a separate branch of legal studies at most law schools today.

last revised 5/5/2000

“With or without Congressional action, EPA will be free to regulate greenhouse gases, resulting in one of the largest and most bureaucratic nightmares that the U.S. economy and Americans have ever seen. And, with EPA in the lead, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, arguably the voice of agriculture and rural America, would be left out of the process. Let me be clear, this is not a responsibility we want to leave in the hands of EPA.””
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