Actually, there are two potential scandals here...Insider-trading probe of Medicare announcement reveals hundreds of HHS employees had secret info
This ruling is a huge win for the Obama regime and a huge loss for America. Anything that uses fossil fuels can now be subject to government regulation. Say hello to mud huts and skyrocketing energy costs.Federal Court Gives EPA Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Save Earth
I reported recently on EPA rules that ran the risk of causing shut downs of plants in Texas and elsewhere. But that was before the massive heatwave began putting the real strain on them. So much so that they are almost at full capacity. And unfortunately, the EPA is only tightening it’s grip. . .Lisa Jackson is Using the EPA to Destroy the Coal Industry
Carlin's report, updated, expanded, and peer-reviewed, was published in the respected International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.Ron Arnold: Suppressed EPA Hushgate climate report returns to snag CO2 regulation
Carlin's 47-page, no-nonsense report rips computer modeling, false comparisons between hypotheses and real-world data, and efforts to manipulate climate measurements.
Main points: The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions are vastly lower than EPA estimates, and the costs are vastly higher. Conclusion: "the risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it."
Actually, it’s not just the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s minority contingent that fears the loss of nearly a million jobs from new EPA rules on greenhouse gases and other emissions issues. It’s also groups like the United Steel Workers, Unions for Jobs and the Environment, and experts like King’s College Professor Ragnar Lofstedt. Hot Air got an exclusive look at a report that the EPW minority staff will release later this morning detailing the economic damage that an activist EPA will do to the American economy, and which will come at perhaps the worst possible time, both economically and politically....we can expect more pollution, not less — just outsourced along with the jobs in the industry!
The executive summary spells out the stakes involved in the effort to rein in the EPA...
Whereas Obama is trying to crush Arizona by suing it into the ground to prevent it from defending itself from illegal immigration, and it is preventing any clean up efforts in Louisiana after 71 days, it has just been learned from one of our conatcts in Texas that Obama by way of the EPA has just shut down today 33% of the country’s refining capacity.Read more
While Obama was unsuccessful at putting a moratorium on oil drilling, he was able to accomplish the same thing by putting a stranglehold on oil refining which accomplishes the same thing. With 1/3rd of the country’s oil refining gone what do you think this will do to the economy? This was the inherent threat that Obama had presented for months. Either give him Cap and Trade or we will shut everything down through the EPA.
What do you think this will do to the economy of Texas.
Let's recap what has happened in the last 90 days...
Republicans are so determined to stop what they say is abusive and unlawful expansion of the federal government under President Obama that they are willing to abdicate power to the states to do it.Read more
Taking its cue from the Bill of Rights, the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative House Republicans, says that the 10th Amendment dictates that initiatives such as the health care reform law and other massive government programs are the business of state governments, not Washington.
So the RSC this week announced that it had formed a 10th Amendment task force to help "usher in a new era of federalism" and to work to disperse power from Washington back to regions, states and local governments.
Other folks to keep your eye on is the collection of very heavy hitters with very deep pockets organized as the Coalition for Responsible Regulation (CRR). They have banded together to spend whatever it takes on the savviest Washington law firms to tie the EPA and its greenie supporters like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club into legal knots.Coalition for Responsible Regulation (CRR) - one of their legal challenges to the EPA.
Here is one of their legal challenges to the EPA (it's worth reading entire). There will be plenty more. As Greenpeace is warning its members, the CRR is "powerfully organized and rich. They have all the tools and all the lawyers, and they are going to do all they can to stop carbon regulation."
There is still the US-EPA's drive to extend the Clean Air Act to include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as "pollutants." But with the evidence of ClimateGate in hand, EPA's attempt to provide the necessary scientific justification for its "Endangerment Finding" will surely fail. Whoever leaked the incriminating e-mails deserves a medal for saving the US economy from certain ruin.
The writer, an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, is the organizer of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and coauthor of its reports "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate" [2008] and "Climate Change Reconsidered" [2009].
Driving the push for this massive power grab and circumvention of the elected branches is a key White House official who avoided Senate confirmation by being installed not as EPA director, but instead as White House Climate Czar: Carol Browner.Read the whole thing!
Long before the Supreme Court ruled in a highly questionable 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA, that the EPA has the legal authority to justify its proposed 18,000 pages of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act, Browner (then EPA director under President Bill Clinton) had her general counsel, Jonathan Cannon, prepare a now-infamous memorandum arguing—for the first time—that the EPA possessed such a power. At the time it was dismissed as a wild-eyed overreach that Congress would never allow. Now it’s happening, and Browner is right at the center of it.
Mary Nichols, the chair of the California Air Resources Board, has confirmed that Browner was the lead White House negotiator in establishing new automobile emissions standards, which for the first time rely on EPA’s presumed authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the 1970 Clean Air Act. Nichols told The New York Times that Browner quietly orchestrated private discussions from the White House with auto industry officials. “We put nothing in writing, ever,” Nichols said.
Left unchecked, Browner will move beyond automobiles to EPA’s entire staggering 18,000-page blueprint for regulating the U.S. economy. It will eventually regulate everything that moves (light-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks, buses, motorcycles, planes, trains, ships, boats, tractors, mining equipment, RVs, lawn mowers, fork lifts, and just about every other piece of equipment that has a motor) and lots of things that don’t (any building over 100,000 square feet could be pulled in, along with smaller carbon dioxide emitters, like restaurants, schools, and hospitals that have commercial kitchens with gas burners).
...one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science...vowing that "the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over." Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency.The Competitive Enterprise Institute discovered emails from Mr. Carlin's boss telling him, basically, to shut up and forbidding him to speak about this again to anyone. Here's where the Obama administration, once again, is concealing information that the taxpayers and citizens of this country legally have a right to know:
Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.
Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA's endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both "the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded." In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin's study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.The EPA Silences A Climate Skeptic
Unable to defend the EPA's actions, the climate-change crew -- , led by anonymous EPA officials -- is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a "denier." He is, we are told, "only" an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn't his "job" to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with "informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.") His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.)
The whole point of cap and trade -- which President Obama is careful not to make explicit -- is to make fossil fuels so expensive we will use less of them.Green Nonsense
The president won't call this a tax. But his most prominent supporter in the business community, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, thinks it's one which will devastate an economy already in "shambles."
"It's a huge tax and there is no sense calling it anything else," Mr. Buffett said in a CNBC interview June 24.
President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.And finally:
The Washington press corps is playing the bill's 219-212 passage as a political triumph, even though one of five Democrats voted against it. The real story is what Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House baron Henry Waxman and the President himself had to concede to secure even that eyelash margin among the House's liberal majority. Not even Tom DeLay would have imagined the extravaganza of log-rolling, vote-buying, outright corporate bribes, side deals, subsidies and policy loopholes. Every green goal, even taken on its own terms, was watered down or given up for the sake of political rents.
Mr. Obama wants something tangible to take to the U.N. climate confab in Denmark in December, but the more important issue is what this exercise says about his approach to governance. The President seems to believe that the Carter and Clinton Presidencies failed by fighting too much with Democrats in Congress. So his solution is to abdicate his agenda to Congress -- first the stimulus, now cap and trade, and soon health care. We wish he had told us he was running to be Prime Minister.The Carbonated Congress
According to the world's leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago...Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful’, reveals Christopher Booker.Polar bear expert barred by global warmists
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.Read the whole thing
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
