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Two Powerful Blows Against Air Pollution Controls
The NYTimes reports from Washington on two separate actions on Friday that, between them, have halted Bush administration clean-air initiatives in their tracks. The current administration is no favorite of environmental groups, but these groups sided with the administration in a court case brought by the utility companies. On Friday an appeals court threw out the EPA's Clean Air Interstate Rule, established in 2005. The court ruled that the EPA had exceeded its authority when it established that rule, which set new requirements for major pollutants. According to the article, even the utilities were appalled to see the rule completely gutted; their objections had been narrower. Here is a podcast with the reporter (MP3) giving some background on the ruling. The second major blow to clean-air efforts came later in the day on Friday. Quoting: "...the EPA chief rejected any obligation to regulate heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide under existing law, saying that to do so would involve an 'unprecedented expansion' of the agency's authority that would have 'a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy,' touching 'every household in the land.'... In effect, Mr. Johnson was simultaneously publishing the policy analysis of his scientific and legal experts and repudiating its conclusions."
I think I will make the best of this, take my HUMMER out for a ride.
Every American should be fitted with a government issued flatulence belt and sphincter funnel.
Task Mangler
If I get it right, the EPA is allowed to be given authority to do things as long as they have no real effect? Of course the EPA is going to have a profound effect on every sector of the economy. If you curtail CO2 emissions you are basically affecting every step of production delivery and consumption of most goods. That is, after all, the gravity of the situation.
WTF is the EPA for anyway?
OTOH this is looking like an episode of Yes Minister, with the approach of overdoing a popular idea to make sure it sinks.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I don't know. While I am in favor of environmental regulations, the fact that the courts threw out the entire mess might be a blessing in disguise. It will be back to the drawing board and the Bush administration will not have enough time to put new ones into effect. The regulation that the courts threw out probably was filled with loopholes that would let polluters off the hook. Maybe a new (and hopefully environmentally friendly) administration will do it correctly.
Here's the announcement:
(Washington, D.C. - July 11, 2008) Today EPA released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) soliciting public input on the effects of climate change and the potential ramifications of the Clean Air Act in relation to greenhouse gas emissions.
And here is the transcript of Johnson's conference call on the release.
Finally, here is the (588 page PDF) document itself.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Sorry, the IRS is already up my ass.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yeah, that's the simpleton way to see things and it's all too popular around here. While we're at it, low emissions vehicles still produce emissions. We should just let people go on with whatever they want until a zero emission vehicle is created. After all, what's the point in doing what you can when you can if you can't do it all at once?
Talk about some serious asshattery.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
buys stock in the gas mask industry...
The EPA is basically meaningless. The powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states, and the people. 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Perhaps the most important Amendment in that it limits the reach of the Federals.
Unfortunately (for the better part of a century), the Congress has behaved as if there were no restrictions whatsoever on their authority. As if "anything we can dream up, we can do." This is one of those rare times that a federal court seems to understand the Fed (and it's agencies') power is limited.
And no, "regulation of interstate commerce" clause, so often abused, does not grant this authority; It does not give free reign to the Feds to do anything they wish. Practically speaking, the Framers of the Constitution would not construct a careful balance of power, then undo it all with one clause.
Judging by the utilities response, there were probably some loopholes in this act they already have plans in motion for. The Bush administration is known for making deals with energy. That's why they were shocked to have the whole thing thrown out. Most likely, the holes came down from the top, and the EPA threw in some licensing requirements at the last minute. They lucked out and got the whole thing thrown out.
There was a lot of selling of coal and natural gas companies on the East Coast in the last few years in anticipation of this act so it probably threw a wrench into the spokes of the alternate plans (nuclear). Most likely Dick Cheney and the nuclear lobby collaborated on this one. You're probably saying, "Dick Cheney?!" Well, yes. Wyoming is home to the largest deposits of uranium around. He's worked at power and energy companies for all his life. The act alone would I'm sure fuel some speculation in the Uranium markets, of which he and his family are major players.
The 15 year uranium chart clearly shows this amazing run up culminating in the sell off (in late 2007). I don't think we will be hearing from any of these guys for another 10 years, because they have just pulled the biggest scam in the history of America, they have ALL the money now (and just to make sure they printed a lot of extra and gave it to themselves). Oh, and they all moved to Dubai (Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai, and deals equally with Euros and trades on the Dubai exchange).
Cool! Amazing Toys.
EPA == Establishment Protection Agency
Not so fast. Mexico has no environmental controls of any consequence, and the effluent from their power production and manufacturing plants does affect us. Try living downwind from a Mexican power plant.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If you take that line of reasoning then pretty much anything can be justified under "general welfare" and why have a constitution with a limited set of powers anyway?
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
Unfortunately (for the better part of a century), the Congress has behaved as if there were no restrictions whatsoever on their authority. As if "anything we can dream up, we can do." This is one of those rare times that a federal court seems to understand the Fed (and it's agencies') power is limited.
Exactly. Congress follows the letter of the law, not the spirit. If they think they can get away with passing a blatantly unconstitutional law, nothing stops them from trying, especially if someone with deep pockets wants the law to pass. (See: The War on Drugs, banning online gambling, the 55 MPH speed limit, etc.)
until a zero emission vehicle is created
It's called a bicycle...
If you have the power to declare any substance whatsoever to be a pollutant, and then to heavily regulate its release.
I propose that lobbyists be declared a pollutant.
A bicycle isn't a complete solution. I shouldn't have to explain that either. I'm extremely happy for the people who can use that route and wish I could do it myself but in my current circumstances it's just not going to happen. I'll be happy for the day I can arrange for it though.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Do you want the government to tell you when you can drive?
What temperature to set your house at?
How many kids you can have?
What you can do, see, eat, or be?
The average person will tell you that, NO...they don't want any of this. Of course, the same person will say they want OTHERS regulated. The government should come in and regulate companies, they should regulate cities! Regulate farmers, miners, whatever, as long as it doesn't mean THEY are effected.
If your AVERAGE person really gave a shit, they would ALREADY be limiting their impact. For example, I drive as little as I can, recycle, bike as much as I can, turn off my CFL bulbs when not in use, xeriscape, etc...ALL without the government having to tell me to. This is what we call FREE AGENCY. Freedom...liberty. The choice to drive a Prius or a Hummer.
Thomas Jefferson would punch most of you dead in your shit!
How come liberals don't believe in liberty? Why are they only pro-choice when it comes to abortion? Thomas Jefferson would punch most of you dead in your shit!
So Bush doesn't sign us up for Kyoto or other measures...and everyone shits their collective pants about how evil Bush and the USA are cause of it. Most of the countries that DO sign these things don't even have to do anything! How fucking easy is it to sign something that doesn't require you to do anything? Most of these countries sign stuff left and right, like pledging troops for the SFOR, or Darfor...like pledging money for Afghan reconstruction..and they never actually pitch in....
How fucking easy is it to sign up when you don't intend to actually do your part? And the US is the bad guy, cause we just don't sign up? Fuck that.
THL phish sticks
Here's what we know (for sure) about global warming:
Increases in atmospheric CO2 cause warming.
Man has been increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The Earth has been warming.
However, we cannot link any of these together in a cause and effect relationship, because the Earth has been warming long before man started to emit CO2. The last ice age (10K years ago) is still melting, and the last 1.5K year warming trend is still on the upswing. Water vapor has a more significant effect on warming, and we don't even know if more clouds increase or decrease warming. It would be a HUGE negation of science for the EPA to say that CO2 is a pollutant.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Uhhhhh..... you DO realize that bicyclists exhale CO2, right?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes
This is stating that they have power to collect taxes for just about everything, not that they have the power to do just about everything.
Learn to love Alaska
Sure, a good kick, in the standard broken-window-fallacy sense.
Not that the pollution isn't metaphorically breaking a few windows itself, but the nation's economy has better things to be doing than up and moving cities for the sake of the construction workers. It's wasteful.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Or some countries are plowing all their plants for farming, housing, fuel, or even just to make work.
The good news is, you are right...it's idiot proof, if we fuck it up too bad, huge wars, death, famine, disease, and weather will put things back were they were...and it will get back to normal. (:
THL phish sticks
I'm not the one who's throwing my hands in the air and proclaiming that Bush is evil and we may as well wait for a better solution. But you insist on omitting my original thoughts in full to make me look bad? Nothing but simple and ineffective trolling. Otherwise you'd put your name to it.
A bike isn't a complete solution was what I said but I also mention in my circumstances. I never said that bikes are worthless because they don't fit into my circumstances but you tried to make it seem like that was my intent. Again, ineffective to anyone who follows the thread.
I'd gladly ride a bike if I could (i mentioned that too, why not quote that?). And I do from time to time but for exercise instead of real transport. So, yes, I'm a bike owner and rider. I can't realistically ride one to my place of employment though and that makes up a good 85-90% of my commutes.
Again, this is shit I shouldn't have to explain to people who can read my WHOLE post and put 2 and 2 together. But it seems that lots of Slashdotters are all too happy to be assholes instead of real people.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If the interstate commerce clause can regulate my growing and selling of marijuana to my neighbor here in California, then I don't see why it can't be used to regulate CO2 emissions, which do cross state lines...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I'm not actively disagreeing with you, but your reading of the 10th Amendment is expressly contradictory of the way courts have read it. For most of the Modern Jurisprudential (post-Lochner) Era, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 10th Amendment has been the following:
The Tenth Amendment was intended to confirm the understanding of the people at the time the Constitution was adopted, that powers not granted to the United States were reserved to the States or to the people. It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified.
United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716, 733 (1931).
Thus in effect the 10th Amendment is a nullity in terms of its scope and power. There have been attempts to revive the 10th Amendment as a restriction on the Commerce Power--some as recently at the 1970s--but the Court has been quite divided over whether it wants to do this. There's some interesting reading on the subject here.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
The point is, we should try to have as little impact on our environment as possible, since we've shown ourselves to be clueless as to the actual effects of what we've already done.
This clause is commonly referred to as the Tax and Spend Clause and has been commonly read to give Congress the power to tax and spend for the general welfare, not to regulate for the general welfare. Thus, if Congress wanted to tax pollution for the general welfare, it could. This specific clause does not give Congress the power to regulate pollution for the general welfare. Congress has no general police power.
If you want to know more about the history and interpretation of the clause, there is some excellent reading here.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Two giant leaps for libertarians.
That is what everyone here claims to be, come FISA and DMCA time, right?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
SURPRISE SURPRISE! The founding fathers were... SURVEY SAYS! no! no philosophical angels looking for a better way, but politicians!
limited government clauses made antifederalists happy, the "general welfare" and the "necessary and proper" clauses let federalists have the last laugh.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Personally, I think that the EPA was right to claim that they can't regulate carbon emissions. The reasoning they stated was absolutely and 100% valid. Regulation of carbon emissions (and other heat trapping gases) is a big deal. You are talking about going from open seasons to something much more restrictive. The vast majority of companies don't even know how much they are dumping out because it is currently unregulated. The EPA regulating carbon emissions would be a very very big deal. It would have some very dramatic effects upon the price and have an effect upon the economy.
I am not against regulating such emissions, but it isn't up to a government bureaucrat to make such a significant decision. This truly is the role of elected officials. Congress needs to get up off their collective asses and decide what the law of the land should be in terms of green house gas emissions. Congress needs to decide what the balance between the economy and the environment is, and they need to be held responsible if they screw it up. The head of the EPA is absolutely correct in throwing up his hands and saying that this is for congress to sort out, not him.
The planetary temperatures are either flat or cooling down. Since its been two weeks since the last sunspot, can anyone say "Little Ice Age"?
Erm ... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
The parent is so far off base it's not even funny. Just take a look at the website the photo of the National Geographic Magazine was located at. (here's the page for the November, 1976 edition). Here's a summary of the website by the way:
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Do you know that there's something perfectly natural that eats up CO2? They are called p-l-a-n-t-s.
Yep. And where does most of this magic happen ? In Earth's oceans. Which we're about to make a lot less hospitable for life through acidification (ironically, mostly through CO2) and overfertilization.
It almost seems as if this earth were designed in such a way that we couldn't mess it up.
We can't mess it up for life in general, but we sure as heck can mess it up for us. And, believe it or not, there are some people who might want to see mankind live and prosper for another couple of ten thousand years, at least.
Global warming is just a part of the problem with using fossilized carbon fuels. One of the biggest problems is that it is a finite source of energy. They will run out in a not so distant future.
CO2 gases arent the only problem either. Cancerogenes and heavy metals arent fun in the long run for our children and the animals. However you look at it its about time we seriously look at other energy sources.
HTTP/1.1 400
God, you aren't helping your case.
-- arstchnca
--
As correct as you may be, it seems that the 10th is only invoked whenever the ruling party doesn't like something.
Although the idea of states' rights is very much open to debate, the wording of the law should be amended to reflect the status quo that's been present ever since the end of the Civil War (remember folks, the constitution is not scripture, and was explicitly designed to be updated as needed).
For one thing, the 10th was drafted long before the sparsely-populated western states were annexed. Many of these states simply don't have the population to support all these agencies, and it would be fairly inefficient to duplicate the efforts of an agency such as the EPA or FDA 50 times over.
As long as the federal agencies are focusing on the issues that affect the majority of the states, I honestly see no problem. States certainly should be able to run their own agencies to tackle their own problems (that's the point after all), though it does make a lot of sense to have a federally-run agency to focus on the big-picture issues.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Exactly... and the morons didn't even read the article, for if they had... they would realize the utilities have already made the changes due to a court settlement. AEP has invested over a billion dollars in retrofitting their coal fired power plants to prevent interstate pollutants.
Erm ... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
Uh, did you look at the numbers? I mean, seriously. The numbers are not absolute temperature averages, they are a number that already statistically indicates above or below normal. It already factors in seasonality and all of that other stuff.
So, if you have got a negative number, it means the region in the column shown did in fact get colder. Secondly, there is a comparison set of columns with a twelve month moving average. Right now, the twelve month moving average is .089 degrees above normal.. however, the trend of that is downwards and has been since August 2007.
The basic theory against AGW is that the sun controls climate in a way that is linked to sunspots but is not understood -yet-. So, it's pretty simple to test. If there is a continued period of low sunspot activity by the sun, then the planet will cool off. If the planet heats up, then, hey, sunspot dudes are wrong and people on the coasts need to learn to swim;.
But... since there's been no or few sunspots for the last couple of months, and the earth is cooling down, AND, the La Nina that was previously cited for the unseasonable cooling is gone, well, I'm betting on the Little Ice Age.
This is my sig.
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
99.99% of the GW believers are earth worshiping religious fruitcakes that only spit off a few talking points to pretend they are hip. Seriously, do you think that aging folk tart Sheryl Crow actually can even write a computer program?
This is my sig.
Damn those bushies, for classifying a hummer as a light truck! It's clearly a, uh, sedan?
It isn't so much about the classification as it is about the application (with apologies to Jessee Jackson on that one). The point that many people have been trying to make is that the business tax laws don't make sense with regards to business vehicles.
For example, if you are a business owner who could just as well drive around in a sedan, why would you buy a truck? You probably wouldn't, until you talk to your accountant and find out that you get a huge tax rebate by buying the truck instead.
The result is we have florists and IT guys driving around in Hummers because it ends up being cheaper to purchase an H2 than a more reasonable sedan.
KARL-ROVE-FROM-BEYOND-THE-GRAVE
I think Mr. Rove would be surprised to hear that he is dead. While plenty of non-conservatives would place Rove as evil, few would place him as dead. Even wikipedia seems to believe he is currently alive.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A bike isn't a complete solution was what I said but I also mention in my circumstances. I never said that bikes are worthless because they don't fit into my circumstances but you tried to make it seem like that was my intent. Again, ineffective to anyone who follows the thread.
I apologise in advance if I missed where you gave the reasons why you cannot bike to work. However...
Why is it not a feasible solution? Is it because you live far away from your work place? Could you move closer? Is it because you have 5 kids, and can't afford a home that can house you, your wife, and kids on your salary?
Maybe having 5 kids was your mistake, and I'd go as far as arguing why do I have to, effectively, pay for the fact that you had too many kids and are using fuels merely because of that.
I'm obviously making a lot of leaps here, and I don't mean to be offensive. But why, then? Why can't you move closer to work?
I couldn't either, at a job I had a few years ago. But then I moved to another city, that has a city-layout that allows for my to be able to bike to work.
People say that you should vote with your dollars. You should also vote with your lifestyle.