By Alan Caruba
In the course of the first year of the Obama administration, it has become clear to many close observers that it is intent on destroying the U.S. economy and, with it, the Republic.
It has virtually shut down all exploration for energy resources such as oil and natural gas despite the bonus of thousands of jobs and billions in tax revenue.
It has declared war on the mining and use of coal even though coal provides just over half of all the electricity generated nationwide.
Its "Stimulus" bill, at this point, has largely distributed funds to state governments to help them pay for Medicare and other entitlement programs. The program has claimed new jobs in congressional districts that don't even exist.
All the while, unemployment has risen and there is no evidence of any actual new jobs because, sensibly, large businesses and small are waiting to see if Obamacare will take over one-sixth of the nation's economy, slashing billions from Medicare, and raising the cost of health insurance. The other major legislative initiative, Cap-and-Trade is a huge tax on energy use, raising the cost of doing business in America.
"Business Fumes Over Dioxide Rule" was a headline in the December 7 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Considering that one major corporation after another has gone out of its way to demonstrate how "Green" they are, it is a little late in the day for corporate America to wake up to discover that the entire agenda of Green organizations has been to strangle the economy in general and their ability to operate in particular.
Two Obama appointments signaled the Obama administration's intent. One was the appointment of Carol Browner, a former EPA director in the Clinton years and an avowed socialist, as its climate czar, and the appointment of Lisa Jackson as the new Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. Others include the Secretary of the Interior and of Energy, all global warming scare mongers.
Today the EPA announced an "endangerment" finding that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a "pollutant" and thereby subject to EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act. If that is true than everyone exhaling in the nation is, by definition, a polluter. Humans exhale about six pounds of CO2 every day.
In January, I wrote a commentary, "Glorious Carbon Dioxide", that was a look at the science of CO2. It can be found at www.acuf.org/issues/issue124/090126cul.asp
One simple fact invalidates the EPA's claim. All life on Earth is dependent on two gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide. A reduction of CO2 would be a reduction of the gas that all vegetation relies upon for its existence, but the EPA claims that a rise in CO2 is responsible for a rise in the overall temperature of the Earth.
The EPA is doing this as a completely natural cooling cycle has been occurring since 1998. It is doing this despite ample scientific data that demonstrates that CO2 does not play any role in the increase of the Earth's average temperature, but in fact increases many decades, even centuries, after such an increase.
