A Call To Arms

[JohnRgt 0]

EPA Fascism versus America (7 of 7)

To cite a blatant example of this unprecedented power over our lives, the EPA will have the power to ration food production in America. Farm machinery, processing plants, and trucks, railroads, and ships transporting food, would operate only with the permission of the EPA. Even basic agriculture and the biological functioning of animals will not be exempt.

The unconscionable growth of federal power embodied in the ANPR will subvert, distort, and destroy the American form of government and thus the liberty necessary to our well-being. This will smother the intellectual cause of our prosperity by shackling the thoughts and actions of every American to the whims of bureaucrats. This will wreck the material cause of that prosperity by chaining its private industrial base to a bewildering maze of arbitrary, shifting rules.

From now on, every industry and every citizen will exist by permission of the EPA administrator, and not by right.

[ewv 0]

The EPA's proposal for a 70% reduction in CO2 over the next 41 years moves the election off the front pages for me. Who wins the election -- a topic that has occupied my thoughts recently -- is a very very small story in comparison to the birth of this regulatory monster..

On the contrary, it illustrates the importance of the election. Federal statutes are filled with ambiguous and sweeping powers for regulatory monsters. How the Federal agencies interpret and impose them through their rules depends on who is in the White House controlling the Executive Branch of government. It is increasingly difficult to hold back the viro activists entrenched in the civil service, but it does make a difference. These new EPA regulations would have come much sooner under Gore or Kerry, and are only now moving ahead because the viros got the Supreme Court to stop the Bush administration from blocking them. McCain would be no Bush in holding such things back, but he is still under the influence of his fellow Republicans. There are no limits on what Obama would do.

You are absolutely correct.

My comment about who wins the election was the product of my total dismay that the Bush Administration has decided to aggressively exceed its statuatory, legal, and regulatory authority in order to promlugate a vast new regulatory structure that will chock off any growth in the production of man-made power.

There can be little doubt that Mr. Bush and his advisors have decided that someone is going to stop growth in the one industry that is at the root of all production that occurs above the level of agriculture -- if the continued growth of the industrial revolution is to be fundamentally throttled -- it should be done by their hand so that it is done on the least unfavorable terms.

This is typical of the go-along ideological defeatism practiced by conventional middle-of-the-road conservatives.

...

We could use an executive that is capable of rejecting the whole man-made-CO2-catstrophic-global-warming myth -- even if it is only in small increments in the intellectually-cowardly fashion which we can expect from conventional conservatives.

The Bush administration did attempt to stop the EPA power grab but was thwarted in the courts. It is not Bush who wants to "aggressively exceed its statuatory, legal, and regulatory authority in order to promlugate a vast new regulatory structure". The EPA and other Federal agencies are entrenched with viro ideologues operating under the protection of their civil servant status and vague laws giving the agencies sweeping powers. There is only so much that Presidential political appointees can do to contain that with high level policy, and every attempt to do that is met with hysterical smears of "interference". The recent Supreme Court decision on CO2 as a "pollutant" to be controlled by EPA is what put an end to the Bush attempts to contain the EPA. This is political reality, not a result of convential conservatives unwilling to do more.

It is true that sometimes they have put some onerous political control into place in order to head off something worse. Sometimes this has been done enthusiastically by the so-called "free market environmentalists" and sometimes it is done as the only perceived alternative to what would be inevitably worse in the political context of the forseeable future. It is all they can do and they are well aware of what it is and that it only slows down a trend to buy time. Everyone on the "right" is constantly on defense.

That is -- of course -- assuming that a president John McCain does not, in a flourish of "honorable" bi-partisanship appoint such a large fraction of environmentalists, liberal Democrats, RINO Republicans to his cabinet and his inner council that no conventional conservative voices (including Sarah Palin's) are heard.

This is essentially what happened under Bush-I in the late 80's. Dukakis and the Democrats would have been much worse, but Bush wanted to be an "environmental president" and appointed influential viros to key positions in his administration. The resulting devastation in rural America was one of the reasons Bush lost re-election; he had treated his own base so badly that people were desperate and willing to try anything. (Clinton and Gore were not an improvement.) McCain has been weak on property rights and a cheerleader for the viros as a Senator so there is a very real danger he would do the same thing that Bush-I did, evn though Obama and the progressive left Democrats would be even worse.

[Cometmaker 0]

But I do not see how a world with a 70% reduction in hydrocarbon fuel consumption imposed over the next 40 years can produce the power necessary to support geometric economic growth. On the contrary, the energy businessmen of the world should be trying to figure out how to increase the productive uses of hydrocarbon fuels 20-fold over the next 40 years.

To give you an idea of how desperate the situation is under the EPA's new rule, the executives of the large nuclear power company I mentioned earlier spent several days last week entertaining proposals to support the development of a new concept for a laser-fusion power plant. When environmentalists push rational men towards the sci-fi world of "The Children of Men" reasonable but un-philosophical men try to bend the world towards a Buck Rogers sci-fi world.[...]

Perhaps the energy businessmen could support and publicize Henrisk Svensmark's work; he does not have a single petroleum company expressing interest in his research. The EPA and viros pushing rational or reasonable men is not the entire picture. Although this of course does happen, businessmen who ought to both know and do better are not taking advantage of ample opportunity to save themselves. The translation of thinking about rejecting global warming to action in today's politics can be visible as "small increments" at best because those "rational men" have abdicated responsibility for thinking and moral valuing.

[JohnRgt 0]

Paul Saunders will be addressing -- annihilating! -- the man-made GW myth and the statist solutions being proposed to counter it on Bobby Gunther Walsh's 1-hour radio show "One-On-One" on WAEB (790 AM, Allentown, PA) on both the 26th and 27th of January (9:05 to 10:00 am, EST, rebroadcast from 6:05 to 7:00 pm, EST.)

To hear these broadcasts online, go to waeb.com, click on the "ONLINE" tab along the top row of option tabs, and click on the bar that says "Click to Listen to News Talk"