Here’s a long list of stuff from the Head of the EPA at various Congressional hearings. Watch the video.
EPA chief Gina McCarthy has admitted the agency’s sweeping climate regulations of fossil fuel fired plants have no impact on the climate.
She admits that the Clean Power Plan “is not about end of pipe controls.” The rule, she says, is about “driving investment in renewables…, [and] advancing our ongoing clean energy revolution”. McCarthy says, “That’s what… reinventing a global economy looks like.”
That should terrify us all. They are willing to destroy our economy and way of life for a global revolution in something that has not borne success.
Some quotes from the video below:
“The value of this rule is not measured [by its climate impact]. It is measured by showing strong domestic action…”
-US House Science Committee
-July 9, 2015“[T]here is absolutely no reason to” measure the climate impact of the Clean Power Plan “because we know it will take a lot of efforts to actually make those reductions”.
-Senate Appropriations Committee
-April 20, 2016“We don’t have to prove that any reduction [in greenhouse gas emissions] will actually make a precipitous difference” in global warming.
-IHS Energy CERA Week
-February 24, 2016The “benefit” of the Clean Power Plan is “in showing sort of domestic leadership as well as garnering support around the country for the agreement we reached in Paris.”
-House Energy and Commerce Committee
-March 22, 2016“[The Clean Power Plan] is not about pollution control. […] This is an investment strategy…”
-Senate EPW Committee
-July 23, 2014“[The Clean Power Plan] is about advancing our ongoing clean energy revolution […] That’s what… reinventing a global economy looks like.”
-Council on Foreign Relations
-March 11, 2015“[The Clean Power Plan] is a fundamental way of relooking at where the United States is heading and how to maintain our competitive edge… That’s what this is all about.”
-Council on Foreign Relations
-March 11, 2015Gina McCarthy told Rep. Smith during testimony that the value of the rule was “enormously beneficial,” but then tries to say the 1/100th of a degree meets the definition of enormously beneficial. The only benefit is to control us and lead us into a global economy which is socialist and which will be fueled inadequately.
She said the Supreme Court asked us a very similar question and agreed with the EPA that while we can’t define the exact reductions that would be achieved from any one action in climate, there is absolutely no reason to do that because we know it will take a lot of efforts to actually make those reductions.
“We see this as great benefit in showing domestic leadership…” Look, the American people don’t care about “domestic leadership” in a global initiative. They care that they have jobs next week. Unfortunately Gina McCarthy is more concerned with sending the right signals to her fellow cult members than the well being of the people of the United States who she is responsible for regulating. The goal of the US government is right there in the Preamble of the Constitution “promote the general welfare.” None of what she is proposing, no, inflicting on an unsuspecting populace is promoting anything but the agenda of the state, and damn the people, full speed ahead.
The country already has an economy that’s been more or less dead for the last ten years or so, kept on life support by the Fed’s dropping interest rates to nothing and the constant asset destruction of the large companies buying their own stock rather pursuing economic activity. Meanwhile a third of the country is NILF and even more are only able to work part time.
Meanwhile the EPA is saying that they don’t need any data other than their cultish belief in a catastrophe that looks ever more unlikely.
McCarthy also said she “doesn’t actually need the raw data in order to develop science. That’s not how it’s done.”
Rep. Smith: “But why don’t you give us the data you have and why can’t you get that data you do have? Surely you have the data that you based the regulations on?”
McCarthy: “EPA actually has the authority and the need to actually get information that we have provided to you.”
Rep. Smith: “You’re saying you can’t give us the information because it is personal and then you’re saying you don’t have the information. Which is it?”
McCarthy: “There is much information we don’t have the authority to release.”Rep. Smith reiterated again that any personal information would be redacted and once again asked why she won’t release this information after meeting all the criteria McCarthy used to justify not revealing the information. Rep. Smith reminded her that every other agency does this, so why can’t the EPA simply redact this personal information and release the underlying science on which the EPA’s regulations are based?
McCarthy stressed that the science is generated through the peer-reviewed process and not by the agency itself, prompting Rep. Smith to say that by not showing the American people and the Congress the studies and data they used to make new regulations, it looks like the EPA has something to hide. Rep. Smith said there was no good reason other scientists couldn’t review the data, no good reason his committee couldn’t review it, and most important, the American people can’t review it.
Changing topics, Rep. Smith asked McCarthy about the Clean Power Plan, reminding her that after spending enormous amounts of money and implementing burdensome regulations, increasing the costs of electricity that would hurt the poorest Americans, it would only lower global temperatures 1/100 of a degree. “How do you justify such an expensive, burdensome, onerous rule that isn’t going to do much good?…Isn’t this all pain and no gain?”
McCarthy admitted the goal of the Clean Power Plan was to show strong domestic action which can trigger strong global action, e.g., getting other countries to follow our lead. McCarthy refused to say if Rep. Smith’s analysis of the minuscule effect on global temperatures was correct, stating again it was more about leading on a global scale. She also refused to give Rep. Smith a timetable on when he could expect supporting documentation that he had been requesting for months.
Later in the hearing, Rep Dana Rohrabacher (R) was shocked that McCarthy did not have any idea what percentage of the atmosphere was made up of carbon dioxide (CO2). Stunned by this admission, Rohrabacher said, “You’re head of the EPA and you did not know? …Now you are basing policies that impact dramatically on the American people and you didn’t know what the content of CO2 in the atmosphere was… the justification for the very policies you’re talking about?”
McCarthy: “If you’re asking me how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, not a percentage but how much, we have just reached levels of 400 parts per million.”
Rohrabacher: “I think I was very clear on what I was asking. I think it was very clear you didn’t know.”This is not the first time McCarthy has flunked knowing basic science. In a Senate hearing in March, McCarthy was unaware of climate data showing no increase in extreme weather. At that hearing, she was asking for additional money be dedicated to the president’s controversial Clean Power Plan, an initiative to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are blamed for any type of bad weather.
http://www.examiner.com/article/epa-head-we-don-t-need-to-justify-our-regulations-with-data
Or you can go with the alternative view, which is that there’s a vast administrative state out there, some of it kind of reporting to the President and some not, and they can just do whatever the hell they want. After all, they’re the experts, and they know much better than the mere people what is best for them. Today this second view has been adopted by around 98% of the legal academy, as well as by four of the current eight justices of the Supreme Court. (Soon to be five? We’ll see.)
But, you ask, the Constitution is right there for all to see and is so simple in its structure and commands; is it really so easy just to evade it entirely? The answer is that today the world of legal and constitutional scholarship is characterized by such a pervasive and powerful groupthink that it is no longer necessary to make arguments that even pass the proverbial “straight-face test.” Of course the agencies have to be able to do whatever they want! Otherwise all hell will break loose! (Or something like that.)
For today’s first example, consider the decision today from the federal District Court for the District of Columbia (Judge Rosemary Collyer) in United States House of Representatives v. Burwell. I cannot find a copy of the full text of the decision online, but here are reports from The Hill and from Fox News. This is the case where Republicans in the House have sued the executive to enjoin it from spending unappropriated money to pay to health insurance companies to save them from incurring big losses under Obamacare. Oh, the government has gone right ahead and spent some tens of billions of dollars on this purpose over the past few years, even though there has been no appropriation of money for the purpose by the Congress.
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/5/12/another-day-in-government-metastasization
Apparently the Administration doesn’t seem to believe that there should be any limits on what they can do. Ms. McCarthy is not alone in behaving like a dictator in the Administration. The very fact that the Paris Agreement has not even been brought before the Senate, let alone ratified while the EPA imposes regulation based on it’s requirements demonstrates how the Administration thinks that things should go. and no amount of court action seems to be able to stop them. Frankly I can’t see that anything the EPA does at this point can have the force of law if the Senate and the courts all agree that the EPA actually has no authority.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials are moving ahead with a key part of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) despite the Supreme Court issuing a stay against the agency’s global warming plan in February.
The EPA submitted a proposal to the White House for green energy subsidies for states that meet the federally mandated carbon dioxide reduction goals early. The Clean Energy Incentive Program would give “credit for power generated by new wind and solar projects in 2020 and 2021” and a “double credit for energy efficiency measures in low-income communities,” according to Politico’s Morning Energy.
The move seems to violate the Supreme Court’s stay against CPP preventing the EPA from implementing its plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants. EPA, however, argues it’s doing this for states that want to voluntarily cut emissions — despite this being part of CPP.
It would help if Congress could get straight answer, but at this point that’s not happening. Yet another agency of the Administration is thumbing their noses, lying to Congress, withholding documents and just plain ignoring the Constitution and the rule of law. For what purpose? It seems that the EPA is doing this to keep the gravy train for Administration cronies going as long as possible, do as much damage to the economy as they can and wrap themselves in the blanket of the morality of protecting the planet.
The problem is that the Administration never seems to consider the impact of its actions beyond the basics of meeting the needs of the various groups supporting whatever agenda. The administration can’t seem to wrap its head around the damage that they are doing. The problem is that robbing producing Peter to give money to crony Paul has pretty severe downsides if producing Peter goes out of business and it won’t take very much more of the interference and rulemaking from the EPA to put a LOT of Pauls out of business.
Signaling he would be a tool of the environmentalist movement that for so long has had a death-grip on the policymaking process, early in the 2008 presidential campaign Obama told reporters straight-out that his plans would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”
“Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“They will pass that money [sic] on to consumers,” the economic illiterate Community Organizer-in-Chief said confusing the concept of money with added production costs.
The report by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is titled “Obama’s Carbon Mandate: an account of collusion, cutting corners, and costing Americans billions.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259684/crushing-poor-middle-class-epa-matthew-vadum
Poor people and more and more, the middle class do not have the money to pay the kind of electric and other energy rates that the new EPA regulations are going to demand. That means that more than likely here in New England and other areas where it get cold in the winter, many people, especially the elderly on fixed income will freeze to death or have to choose between electricity or eating. Europe is already at that point.
Of course not even the laws of physics or thermodynamics can stand a chance against the fervor of the EPA. Consider, for instance the totally unnecessary raising of the CAFE standard. At this point, with oil so plentiful that oils producers will be fracking well they’ve drilled, but not fracked for decades, does putting an increased mileage standard on motor vehicles make any sense? Let alone one that is so onerous that it’s going to require expensive new automotive technologies and be right at the boundaries of the laws of thermodynamics. But that doesn’t stop the EPA.
The standards were established jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the EPA.
The combined passenger car and light truck fleet wide compliance targets were set at 54.5 mpg, and 163 grams of CO2 per mile for 2025.
But the actual rules, as printed in the Federal Register, which are 577 pages long, are far more complicated.
First, the targets are set based on the vehicle’s foot print, i.e., the wheel base multiplied by the track dimensions. Smaller cars must meet higher standards.
Next, each manufacturer receives credits for adopting technologies that don’t affect test results, such as active grille shutters, stop-start systems, and high-efficiency lights.
Next, there will be extra credits for selling electric (EV), PHEV and fuel cell vehicles. For example, the number of EVs sold in 2021 will be multiplied by a factor of 1.5. There will also be air conditioning credits, and incentives for natural gas vehicles.
The above graph from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and the University of Michigan, establishes that light vehicle milage improved by nearly 6 mpg between 2007 and 2014, but that there has been no improvement since then.
Since mid-2014, the price of gasoline has gone from nearly $4 per gallon to around $2.
The benefit analysis, used by the NTSHA for justifying the regulations, was based on $3.86 per gallon.
Looming before Americans is the immense increase required by 2025, which is from 25.2 mpg to 54.5 mpg, or 46.2 mpg after taking the special credits, such as for air conditioning, into consideration.
The EPA says the increase can be easily achieved, but Americans will need to decide whether that’s true.
The above graph, based on the initial graph from the WSJ, depicts the huge increase in mpg required between now and the 2025 model year.
It will require automobile manufacturers to increase fleet mileage by 183%.
Merely duplicating the same rate of increase that was achieved between 2007 and 2014 would result in fleet mileage requirements of approximately 34 mpg, a 135% increase from today’s level.
Even more telling is that the regulations currently require an increase over 1/3 greater than merely replicating the increase achieved between 2007 and 2014.
https://dddusmma.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/collision-of-mileage-regulations-and-technology/
See that flat line in the graph? That’s where further mileage improvements meet cost and practicality. Along with the laws of thermodynamics. When it comes to thermal efficiencies their is a maximum limit and you just can’t go any higher on mileage.
That is without killing massive numbers of American drivers. Small cars are not safe cars.
Of course I get the feeling that the EPA bureaucrats don’t like average people very much. They certainly don’t like us eating is the war on farmers is any indication. While the AGW stuff is bad, going to war on the food supply comes under the category of just plain crazy. Yet, that’s exactly what the people at the EPA and their friends at the Army Corps Of Engineers have been doing for a long time now. Where that ends up is hard to determine, but I’m guessing that it’s not a happy place.
http://www.offthegridnews.com/radio/epa-fines-chicken-farmer-37500-each-time-it-rains/
I think it’s clear that the EPA has gone far beyond the agency’s original mandate. In pursuing an agenda based on the desires of foreign billionaires and other globalization types the agency has gone dangerously down the path toward driving the country to ruin. It’s time to reign in or abolish the agency before the damage becomes permanent.
The Arts Mechanical 