EPA fiats threaten American lives, livelihoods, living
standards and life spans
By Paul Driessen
The
United States
will “do more,” before it’s “too late” to prevent “dangerous” global warming,
President Obama told Berliners last week. If Congress won’t act, he will, by
regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, increasing subsidies and
reduce environmental overview for wind and solar projects on federal lands, and
issuing other rules that will adversely affect economic growth and job
creation.
Indeed,
his Environmental Protection Agency is already devising new rules that will
sharply curtail carbon dioxide emissions, by regulating thousands of facilities
that use hydrocarbon energy – and thus ultimately almost everything Americans
make, grow, ship, eat and do.
However,
the manmade global warming “disasters” exist only in computer models and
assertions by scientists who are addicted to billions in government Climate
Armageddon grants. Moreover, the “preventative measures” are far worse than the
disasters EPA claims to be preventing.
Even
the most diehard alarmists have finally recognized that average global
temperatures have hardly budged since 1997, even as atmospheric levels of plant-fertilizing
CO2 climbed steadily. For many areas, the past winter was among the
coldest in decades; the USA and
Britain
just recorded one their coldest
springs on record; and satellite data show that Earth has actually cooled
slightly since 2002.
The
frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts are no
different from observed trends and cycles over the last century. 2012 set
records for the fewest strong tornadoes since 1954 and the number of years with
no category 3 or higher hurricane making US landfall. (The vicious tornadoes
of recent weeks underscore how quickly the weather can swing back to normal
patterns.) Arctic sea ice is within a few percentage points of “normal” levels
for the past fifty years, and the rate of sea level rise is not accelerating.
These
facts completely contradict computer model predictions and alarmist claims.
Moreover, as Climategate and numerous studies have shown, the “science” behind
EPA’s ruling that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare is
conjectural, manufactured, manipulated and even fraudulent.
EPA
is supposed to protect our environment, health and welfare. Instead, it
“safeguards” us from exaggerated or illusory risks – by issuing mountains of
costly, intrusive regulations that endanger our health, wellbeing and wildlife far
more than any reasonably foreseeable effects from climate change.
This
accumulation of anti-hydrocarbon restrictions and penalties is putting EPA in
control of nearly every aspect of our lives. Fuel, compliance and business costs
will soar. Companies will be forced to outsource work to other countries,
reduce work forces, shift people to part-time status, or close their doors.
Poor
and minority families will be unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay
their rent or mortgage, buy clothing and medicine, take vacations, pay their
bills, give to charity, and save for college and retirement.
With
twelve million Americans already out of work, and another eight million working
multiple lower-paying, part-time jobs, EPA’s global warming and 1,920 other
rules over the past four years translate into unprecedented sleep deprivation,
lower economic and educational status, and soaring anxiety and stress. That will
mean greater risk of strokes and heart attacks; higher incidences of depression, alcohol, drug,
spousal and child abuse; more suicides; and declining overall life expectancy.
EPA’s
new 54.5 mpg fuel efficiency standards will force more people into smaller,
lighter, less safe cars – causing thousands of needless additional serious
injuries and deaths every year – in the name of preventing illusory climate and
oil and gas depletion crises.
Federal
regulators use the same phony climate change and energy depletion arguments to
justify letting wind turbine operators slaughter millions of birds and bats
every year – including bald and golden eagles, hawks, condors and whooping
cranes. They continue to promote and subsidize $50-per-gallon biofuels, to
replace oil and natural gas that the world still has in abundance – thanks to
new exploration, drilling and production technologies. This focus on biofuels
also means more rainforests and other wildlife habitats are being cut down in
the name of “renewable” energy.
EPA
and President Obama never consider any of this, in calculating the supposed
“benefits” of their onerous regulations. They refuse to recognize that their
hysterical claims of climate cataclysms are increasingly indefensible. They
ignore the damage that their heavy-handed rules impose on our health, welfare
and environmental quality.
EPA finds, punishes and even
targets anyone who violates any of its ten thousand commandments, even
inadvertently. The agency’s climate change actions, however, are not
inadvertent. They are deliberate, and their effects are harmful and far reaching.
They will affect every American and 100% of our economy.
And
yet, these increasingly powerful bureaucrats – who seek and acquire ever more
control over our lives – remain faceless, nameless, unelected and
unaccountable. They operate largely behind closed doors, issuing regulations
and arranging sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions with radical
environmentalist groups, to advance ideological agendas, without regard for their
impacts on our lives, livelihoods, living standards, health, welfare and
environment.
They
know that, for them, there is rarely any real transparency, accountability or
consequences – even for gross stupidity, major screw-ups, flagrant abuses or
deliberate harm.
We
need to save our environment from environmentalists and EPA – and safeguard our
liberties, living standards and lives against the arrogance of too-powerful
politicians and bureaucrats. How we achieve this, while protecting our lives
and environment from real risks, is
one of the greatest challenges we face.
________________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For
A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism:
Green power - Black death.
©
Paul Driessen * June 20, 2013
Published
in the Washington Times, Monday, June 24, 2013
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