On Thursday, the U.S. Senate is expected to vote on a joint resolution by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski that would overturn a gloomy finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Last year, the agency found that carbon dioxide is a harmful pollutant under the Clean Air Act whose concentration in the atmosphere will do almost everything short of causing an Apocalypse.
The agency warned that CO2, usually thought of as a biological gas necessary for the existence of life, actually “threaten[s] the public health and welfare of current and future generations”. From causing hurricanes, floods, sea levels to rise, and erosion, to bringing about heat-waves, droughts, wildfires, reductions in food production, and deforestation, to even exposing the American people to more pathogens and allergens, the EPA has ascribed to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such calamity usually reserved for the Seven Seals.
Although the EPA’s doomsaying has largely been discredited by recent revelations in climate science, including the Climategate scandal where there was widespread data manipulation by climate scientists to literally cook the books on global temperatures, the finding still has sharp teeth to it.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal last April, “The centerpiece of the Clean Air Act is something called the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS, under which the EPA decides the appropriate atmospheric concentration of a given air pollutant. Under this law the states must adopt measures to meet a NAAQS goal, and the costs cannot be considered.” Because of the agency’s finding, it now has the power under the terms of the Clean Air Act to set regulatory limits on how much carbon the nation is allowed to emit, and to force the states into compliance.
Put another way, the EPA now has the power to arbitrarily restrict how much gasoline, petroleum, natural gas, diesel, and coal is allowed to be burnt by motor vehicles and industry. In principle, it could decide that CO2 is so dangerous that no emissions are allowed at all. Just like that.
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