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From Freeper Markomalley
Does anyone know what happened to this legislation?

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EPA to Impose Global Warming Regulations: Will Congress Intervene?
Heritage ^ | 9/18/2009 | Nick Loris

President Obama doesn’t want to run the auto industry, but he had to, temporarily of course, to save the economy. And Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Lisa Jackson doesn’t want to regulate carbon dioxide, but the EPA seems intent on moving forward regardless. Fortunately, Congress could shorten the EPA’s long, regulatory leash by amending the Interior-Environment appropriations spending bill early next week.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed endangerment finding in April, saying that global warming and climate change pose a serious threat to public health and safety and thus almost anything that emits carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The agency is already targeting the ailing auto industry. New regulations are proposing that the fleet average must reach 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, which will increase the price and decrease the safety of the vehicle.

Earlier in September, Jackson said prefers cap and trade to regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act:

"Legislation is so important, because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly (and) least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution. We get further faster without top-down regulation.”

The amendment planning to be offered would prevent those top down regulations that could include new standards for hotels, retail stores, apartment complexes, restaurants, airplanes, ocean-going freighters and tankers and even lawnmowers. And the regulations would be costly.

Heritage economists modeled the effects of proposed EPA regulations and found:

• Cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) losses are nearly $7 trillion by 2029 (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars), according to The Heritage Foundation/Global Insight model (described in Appendix A).
• Single-year GDP losses exceed $600 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars).
• Annual job losses exceed 800,000 for several years.
• Some industries will see job losses that exceed 50 percent.

The full report is available here. It’s safe to say these cost estimates are low since the model does not consider the substantial administrative costs of complying with the new regulations. And keep in mind, the job losses are after accounting for “green” job creation.

Congressman Collin Peterson (D-MN) weighed in, arguing the EPA would gain tremendous power and micromanage the economy:

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.”

Whether it’s cap-and-trade legislation or EPA’s proposed regulations, attempting to restrict energy use by cutting carbon dioxide would be toxic to an ill economy. Even in the best of economic times, this policy would likely end them.

See thread for additional internal links.

THREAD

See Freeper Neverdem's Thread:
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Global Warming’s Missing Link: EPA Whistleblower Exposes Agenda’s Fatal Flaw
Energy Tribune ^ | Jul. 20, 2009 | Chris Horner

The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the greatest regulatory intervention in US history, seeking to declare that carbon dioxide poses an “endangerment” under the Clean Air Act, threatening human health and the environment. To hear the EPA tell it, CO2 – which nonetheless remains indispensible to life on earth and without which plants die, more of which produces higher crop yields, etc. – will kill us all.

This proposal is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s attempt to bring the energy sector of the economy under state control just as it seeks to do with health care, essentially ruining something in order to take it over in the name of cleaning up capitalism’s mess. It’s an old play, which the statists have run for decades, certain that every now and then it will break for a big gain.

But an inconvenient EPA career professional just doing his job assessed the premise and informed his superiors, in the sole substantive report presented in the Agency’s internal deliberations, that upon scrutiny CO2 clearly does not drive temperatures or climate but oddly enough, the sun and oceans do. His boss told him to shut up, that nothing good could come to their office by injecting this analysis into the process, as the decision had been made.

One problem with that, of course, is that the decision is not allowed to be made before the process has run its course. That is the entire purpose of an internal debate which, internal documents now prove, was truncated and in fact illusory.

For his troubles, this physics graduate of Cal Tech and MIT PhD economist – which are why he had his job – was subjected to the ritual smear job as unqualified by the thugs running the global warming industry. The nicest thing said about him was “He’s not a climate scientist!” shrieked by legions of non-scientists nonetheless cocksure of their own wisdom, insight and informed judgment on the matter.

Left unmentioned were the scientific credentials of the EPA administrator, President Obama, and the 535 members of Congress who are tasked with deciding the issue. “He’s just an economist!” the non-scientists’ line continued, ignoring that whole physics-degree thing and that, ah, well, the UN’s “chief climate scientist” is “just an economist.” Again, as the whistleblower Dr. Alan Carlin learned, facts have little weight in this debate. Still, one key truth that Carlin brought to the fore exposes how – assuming that sanity prevails in the Senate and Congress is unable to impose “cap-and-trade” energy rationing – his exposé will carry the day in court.

This is man-made warming theory’s missing link. The global warming industry and its political enablers have been getting away with an amazing stunt of backing out from the equation inconvenient things which your lying eyes might tell you. Amid the cries of “warming proceeding even faster than predicted” – an actual, common claim among alarmists, politicians and the media – observations reveal that the recent cooling has brought us to the average of the entire 30-year history of the satellite temperature record.

Climate changes and temperatures go up and down, that’s what they do, so it is surely an amusing coincidence of statistics to see no temperature change following a three-decade-long cooling spell that ended with the coldest decade of the century (the 1970s). To see this as “global warming” hysteria hijacks the policymaking process of a major economic power is staggering.

The crux of what Carlin revealed is that the alarmist campaign has, through indignant repetition and an absurdly flawed syllogism, substituted man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a proxy for temperatures. The disfavored human activity somehow now equates with the weather, a bizarre apples-and-stethoscopes comparison.

To grasp this we need a quick history of the campaign. By the late 1980s “global cooling” had given way to warming as a vehicle for various types to rally the public around their agenda (the Club of Rome admitted this in its 1991 book “The First Global Revolution”). This global warming industry coalesced to demand fealty to a strange premise: Mankind would agree to employ the gentle ministrations of national and, preferably, supranational bureaucrats to keep the earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius higher than “pre-industrial” temperatures.

Now, “pre-industrial” is code for the most cynical statistical cherry-picking of our time, given the approximation with the end of a geophysical phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age, a miserable, cold and cloudy period of crop failure, infant mortality and disease.

This “two degree solution” didn’t last long, thanks to what I can only guess was a nagging fear that the public are aware that temperatures go up and down. It soon gave way to a metric of keeping atmospheric GHG concentrations below a “dangerous” level, though the UN scientists (economists, whatever) tasked with asserting what that level is refused to do so.

This was never about climate anyway but population, lifestyle, energy use and, above all else, control, so such obstacles were ignored and the industry moved right on to a metric even more convenient for them, GHG emissions. This is the tortured path bringing about the oddity of alarmists citing emissions going up faster than predicted as proving that global warming is proceeding faster than predicted, while temperatures are flat and even cooling. To date, it’s worked.

EPA’s “endangerment finding” is rife with this absurd non sequitor: CO2 concentrations are going up, Man’s CO2 is surely behind this, therefore man is causing climate change. In its “finding” the EPA, like the UN’s IPCC, fail to establish the missing link, that CO2 drives climate. Instead, EPA just points to the IPCC, which in turn simply proclaims the relationship, having itself also never having cited any authority establishing (rather than assuming) that CO2 drives temperature or climate, in the past or now.

While never the subject of a US court’s scrutiny, this premise for the entire enterprise will by necessity be a principal focus of any challenge to EPA. It seems highly doubtful that EPA could support such a line of, for lack of a better word, reasoning, particularly in light of Carlin’s stifled analysis and recent peer-reviewed literature. This will only occur by avoiding the panic-stricken acceptance by industry holdouts of some (they hope) a less-bad deal in the Senate for fear of EPA.

Upon scrutiny, covered industry has no option for long-term survival but to pursue victory. This begins in the Senate, which still lacks the votes to pass climate legislation. Neither peace nor concern is for sale, and industry should not cut a deal. The alarmist industry has never been forced to make its case. The EPA can be forced to make it, and it is unlikely that they can.

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Also see post #9 from StarTraveler:

The following is an *excellent* video documentary on the so-called “Global Warming.” I would recommend it to all FReepers. It’s a very well-made documentary.

“The Great Global Warming Swindle” LINK

“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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