The Environmental Protection Agency is a curse on the American nation, and must be abolished.

Its innumerable regulations “to protect the environment”  make energy more expensive, and consumers poorer.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Those [in the US] who fancy themselves to be green progressives are about to get some unwelcome “progress.” Thanks in part to environmental rules, electricity bills are headed for double-digit increases. …

A review of regulatory filings by the news source found that “utilities are seeking permission to pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in new charges to customers to help upgrade aging infrastructure and build new or retrofitted power plants that comply with tougher environmental regulations.” …

Yes, the environmentalists’ bill is now coming due. Some cost hikes are unavoidable. The electrical grid, like other infrastructure, needs to be updated and improved. But the costs due to “tougher environmental regulations” are avoidable. …

Trying to scrub and eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, is counterproductive. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a naturally occurring gas necessary for life on Earth.

But the environmentalists are extreme in their loathing of man-made carbon emissions, and their agenda is supported by many policymakers.

Remember when a 2008 presidential candidate said if he’s elected his cap-and-trade policy would bankrupt anyone who tried to build a coal-fired power plant on his watch?

Well, President Obama has yet to get a cap-and-trade scheme through Congress, yet he is seeing a version of the future he wanted unfold. American Electric Power, which provides electricity to customers in 11 states, plans to retire five of those hated-by-the-left coal plants, which generate enough power to light 3 million homes; retrofit a number of other coal plants at a cost of $8 billion; and add at least two natural gas plants by the end of this decade. …

AEP is not the only power company that is having to pass on the costs of decarbonization and other environmental regulations to its rate payers. The entire industry has to play the game whose rules are fixed in Washington and state capitals. 

Because of this game, “consumers,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40% to 60% in the next few years” due to “pending environmental regulations” that will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. “Many,” continued the Tribune, “are expected to be shuttered.”

This is only the beginning of higher prices.

National Economic Research Associates estimates that the cross-state air pollution and proposed maximum achievable control technology rules could cost the electric power industry $21 billion annually (which will be paid by customers), kill an average of 183,000 jobs a year, and reduce the typical family’s disposable income by $270 a year.

The people behind the policies that drive power bills higher will argue that their motives are pure. They’d say they’re simply trying to make the planet a healthier place.

They’re unlikely to say that their real motive is to gain ever more political power, but gain it they do – and bear the burden with beatific equanimity.

More expensive energy cannot make people healthier, only poorer and colder.

As the  IBD editorial rightly concludes:

They  ignore how much cheap energy has promoted health and accelerated the prosperity that has contributed to our wellness. As such, there’s nothing progressive about the environmentalists’ agenda.

An inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but … he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.  He swooped. Would those by any chance be homemade pies?

They were. Four ladies had made each her favorite pie. They’d brought them to the church to sell at a dollar a slice. The inspector stopped them doing so, telling them that if they did they’d be committing a crime. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to bake a pie in a home kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser.

The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies [for sale] at home if each paid a $35 dollar fee for him to come round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant.

Mark Steyn tells the story in After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. He also tells this one:

Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license” which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatend her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.

And this one:

For their morning customers the Collins family had been putting a coffee pot and doughnuts on the counter of their hardware store for fifteen years…

But in California that’s an illegal act. The permit mullahs told Randy Collins that he needed to install stainless steel sinks with hot and cold water and a prep kitchen to handle  the doughnuts.

Mr Collins was submissive.

“We want to be in compliance with the law” [he said].

“Why?”  Mark Steyn asks.

When the law says it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? …

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t get to vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment, and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

Mark Steyn calls it tyranny. It is.

Another example from a different source:

When California’s elected officials come back from their month-long recess they face a mountain of proposed legislation (almost 900 bills are lined up and waiting), including a new law (SB432) that would require hotels to eliminate flat sheets. Not having fitted sheets on hotel beds would now be a crime in California. This is not a joke.

California, the state trying to deal with a massive $26 BILLION dollar debt, is considering a law that some hospitality industry experts claim would add an estimated $15 to $30 million dollars in costs to an already hurting hotel industry. The low-end estimate of fifteen million is the projected cost to purchase new fitted sheets for the 550,000hotel beds in the state. Of course the hospitality industry is claiming that these added costs will hurt their business and put jobs at risk.

The fitted-sheet bill is the brainchild of State Senator Kevin De Leon (a Democrat from Los Angeles), whose mother suffered back pains while working as a hotel maid. Kevin has been quoted as saying this was “an issue close to my heart.” It is also a bill that has the support of Big Labor. …

We are now going to make it a crime in California not to use a fitted sheet? Really?

The desirability or undesirability of something is not a good reason to legislate for or against it. There should be no more laws than are frugally necessary (administered as rigorously as possible). To make thousands of petty laws that are easy to break through ignorance, incapacity, or bewilderment is to bring the law into contempt.

It’s debatable whether there should be any regulatory laws whatsoever. They are inevitably oppressive. They establish a niggling, nagging, tyranny-of-interference.

Tyranny American-style.

It is communitarian, a sneaky form of collectivization. It is job-killing, impoverishing. Enlarging the reach and power of the state, it is dictatorial.

And it  is Obama’s preferred method of government. He is using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement his dictatorial will. The EPA is continually churning out thousands of regulations to complicate and hamper work in agriculture, animal farming, industry, construction … everything. With this Stasi-like agency, he by-passes Congress.

The only good point made by Jon Huntsman in a recent debate among GOP candidates for the presidency, was that the EPA must be abolished.

Dark dark dark. Are we all going into the dark?

An unnecessary shortage of energy is being imposed on the industrially developed world.

Paul Driessen writes at Townhall:

As Britain suffered through its coldest December in a century, families were forced to choose between keeping homes warm and feeding their children nourishing meals – thanks to climate policies that have forced extensive reliance on wind power and deliberately driven energy prices skyward.

Barely two months later, the UK’s power grid CEO informed the country that its days of reliable electricity are numbered. Families, schools, offices, shops, hospitals and factories will just have to “get used to” consuming electricity “when it’s available,” not necessarily when they want it or need it. A new “smart grid” will be used to allocate decreasing electricity supplies, on a rolling basis or according to bureaucratic determinations as to which consumers most need available power – mostly from wind turbines that provided a pitiful 0.04% of Britain’s electricity during its coldest days last December.

Meanwhile, the EU’s Energy Commissioner warned that German electricity prices are already at “the upper edge” of what society can accept and businesses can tolerate. Taxes, levies and regulations imposed in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming are forcing companies to relocate to other countries and causing “a gradual process of de-industrialization” across Germany. …

Welcome to the Third World, Europeans, where costly electricity is available only from time to time, at unexpected hours, depending on bureaucratic whims and how much power wind turbines and other “environment-friendly” generators can muster.

Is the USA next in line? …

America depends on abundant, reliable, affordable energy – 85% of it hydrocarbons. Coal generates half of all US electricity, and up to 90% in its manufacturing heartland – versus 1% from wind and solar. …

Unlocking America’s still abundant hydrocarbon resources and unleashing our innovative, hard-driving free enterprise system would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in leasing, royalty and tax revenues for federal, state and local governments. It would put millions back to work … help stanch the flow of red ink … keep tens of billions of crude oil spending and investment in America … and create enormous new wealth …

American technology powered by capitalism continues to invent ever better ways of providing energy and making all our lives easier and more productive:

Just consider the incredible revolution that the genius of American capitalists has presented the world: hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to tap previously inaccessible oil and gas deposits. This technology has turned “depletion” and “sustainability” claims upside down. It has already doubled US natural gas reserves and given North America over a century of recoverable gas, at current consumption rates.

It is also unlocking oil wealth in the vast Bakken shale formation of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Oil production there has already soared from 3,000 barrels a day five years ago to over 225,000 today. The US Energy Information Administration says it could reach 350,000 barrels a day by 2035; industry sources say it could top a million barrels by 2020. Related oilfield employment has soared from 5,000 to over 18,000 in the same five-year period, and could eventually reach 100,000 jobs. At $100 a barrel, even 350,000 barrels a day could mean $1.6 billion in annual royalties, from Bakken oil alone. …

It is a technologically possible and economically affordable solution that [could generate] bountiful jobs and revenues – as opposed to pixie dust solutions that require perpetual subsidies and address speculative problems. Offshore and ANWR drilling could do likewise.

But the Obama administration is enforcing its impoverishing energy policy:

Unfortunately, the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and too many in Congress, courts and state legislatures are determined to restrict and obstruct this hydrocarbon revolution. They want to … force America to convert to expensive, subsidized, unreliable, land-intensive wind, solar and ethanol power – and tell people how much energy they can have, and when.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is using groundless claims about possible groundwater contamination to delay fracking operations. Because Congress rejected cap-tax-and-trade, she has rewritten the Clean Air Act to label plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide a “pollutant” and restrict CO2 emissions from power plants, refineries and other facilities. …

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has shut down leasing and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, put tens of thousands out of work, ignored court orders to end his moratorium, and issued decrees that make millions of additional onshore and offshore acres off limits to drilling. He has blocked exploration in ANWR because [ie. on the pretext that – JB] its oil riches won’t make us energy independent (as though even massive wind, solar, ethanol and electric car programs would do so).

President Obama wants oil, gas, coal and electricity prices to “skyrocket,” to make “green” energy appear more attractive. Energy Secretary Steven Chu wants to “boost the price of gasoline to levels in Europe” – over $8 per gallon! …

Why?

The word “social” can have the effect of negating any other word it precedes. For example, a “social conservative” is not a conservative; “social justice” means unjustly taking money away from someone who has earned it and giving to someone who hasn’t.

Similarly, the word “environmental” can change the word it qualifies. For example, “environmental studies” means theories not derived from studying the environment but from hating human freedom.

There is also something called “environmental justice”. The phrase is doubly negating. It is not about doing justice to the environment (whatever that might entail), nor is it about making a suitable environment where  justice might roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

No. It is about robbing industrious Peter to bestow a government “service” on undocumented newcomer Pablo.

Corruption Chronicles brings us this information:

A few months after launching a multi million-dollar campaign to help minorities get green, the Obama Administration is dedicating an additional $7 million to study how pollution, stress and social factors affect “poor and underserved communities.”

It’s all part of the administration’s effort to bring environmental justice to low-income populations by helping them obtain the same degree of protection from health and environmental hazards as wealthy communities. Here’s how it works; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gives money to leftwing groups—including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants—that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through “weatherization” and participate in “green jobs” training.

How many lessons does an illegal immigrant need before he knows how to chuck a can into the recycle bin?

Oh yes, those carbon emissions – the threat that hangs over all mankind.

But what “green jobs” would those be?

To carry out that phase of the environmental justice crusade, some 80 community organizations have received about $2 million. Among the recipients is a New Jersey group (Lazos America Unida) that advocates on behalf of the “Mexican immigrant community” and a Missouri farm workers’ group that will use the money to increase awareness about the dangers of sun and heat exposure in migrant populations.

Doesn’t everyone, wherever he is and wherever he’s from, know that sun and heat exposure can be dangerous? Has someone done one of those solemn academic studies to prove that immigrants are insufficiently aware of that universally acknowledged fact?

This is government parenting to a very high degree!

The “environmental justice” lobby has apparently noticed that poorer folk live in less leafy and spacious spots than the high rent payers do and they don’t think that’s fair.

This week the EPA announced that it’s giving scientists at several universities $7 million to study how pollution, combined with stress and other social factors, affects people in “poor and underserved communities.” The agency refers to it as cumulative human health risk assessment research and the goal is to rid underserved communities of extensive pollution-based problems.

“This ground-breaking research will focus on environments where people are exposed to multiple stressors such as chemicals, anxiety, and poor nutrition,” according to the EPA announcement. “When these stressors are combined, they can lead to a much higher risk of health issues.” The agency is committed to addressing these sorts of contributors to “disproportionate environmental health impacts,” according to a top official.

As none of us can hope to escape chemicals and anxiety, and according to the food-police we’re most of us poorly nourished, will these well-paid researchers come and break some ground in the leafier and more spacious environs of industrious Peter?

What a question! Are not his health impacts all too proportionate? Isn’t he one of those right-wingers who go in for non-social and non-environmental justice? How does he deserve to be researched?

To read a sad story of how “environmental justice” fanatics wrecked an industrial project that would have provided hundred of jobs where they were badly needed, see this article in Reason Magazine.

The immense and imminent threat of “global warming”, supposedly caused by humanity’s feckless ways, has been exposed as a fantasy.

So now the alarmists, who cannot admit defeat because they profit so hugely from their warmed-up panic, cry “climate change” instead.

Sure, the earth’s climate is changing. It’s forever changing. Who’s surprised? And who on earth wants to pay to know more about it?

Pay we do, however, and lavishly, whether we want to or not.

According to Art Horn, meteorologist, about $4 billion of tax-payers’ money will be spent this year – “wasted” as he bluntly and fairly puts it – on climate change research.

Here’s his account of where the money goes:

What can we cut out of the federal budget to make any kind of dent in this enormous pile of borrowed money? We could start with the vast sums of cash being wasted on climate change research.

This year, your government will spend in the neighborhood of $4 billion on global warming research, despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, and despite all of the billions that have been spent so far yielding no conclusive evidence that using fossil fuels to make energy has any significant effect on Earth’s temperature.

The human component of carbon dioxide that is injected into the air each year is very small, on the order of 3%. Half the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity each year is immediately absorbed into nature. Carbon dioxide is 8% of the greenhouse effect; water in the air is 90% of the greenhouse effect. By volume, carbon dioxide is currently at about 390 parts per million in the atmosphere, increasing at about 2 parts per million annually. In other words, carbon dioxide is increasing at a rate of .5% per year. Since human activity adds 3% of the carbon dioxide that gets into the air each year, the human component of the increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year is 3 % of .5%, or just .015%. …

Check the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2011 budget request, and go to chapter 15: Climate Change in the FY 2011 Budget. The numbers are staggering. In 2011, your government will spend $10.6 million a day to study, combat, and educate about climate change.

The big winner in the climate change money train is the National Science Foundation — they are requesting $1.616 billion. They want $766 million for the Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability program, a 15.9% increase from their last budget. They also need another $370 million for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), an increase of 16%. They say they also need another $480 million for Atmospheric Sciences, an increase of 8.1%, and Earth Sciences, up 8.7%.

Oh, and $955 million for the Geosciences Directorate, an increase of 7.4%.

The second largest request for money in 2011 comes from the Department of Energy. They say they need $627 million for things like funding for renewable energy. The request represents a whopping 37% increase from last year! …

Let’s get NASA in on the parade! For 2011, NASA wants $438 million to study climate change, an increase of 14%. NASA’s total Earth Sciences budget request is actually $1.8 billion. …

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is looking for $437 million for climate research. This is an increase of 21.4% from the previous budget. This includes funds for regional and national assessments of climate change, including ocean acidification. Once again, another meaty bag of money to tap into for researchers, who have nice cars and big houses and need to keep up the payments.

The Department of the Interior (DOI) is also interested in robbing the climate change vault — they say they need $244 million in 2011. Of this total, $171 million is for the Climate Change Adaptation initiative. …  Another $73 million is needed for the New Energy Frontier initiative. The goal of this program is to increase solar, wind, and geothermal energy capacity. …

Of course, there’s more. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants $169 million to reduce greenhouse gas emissions …

Is there any government agency that does not get some climate change funding? The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants $338 million for climate change programs. They want $159 million for climate change research, up a whopping 42%. They also want another $179 million for renewable energy, an increase of 41%! The USDA’s climate change efforts are supposed to help farm and land owners adapt to the impacts of climate change. Yes, really.

Redundancy on top of redundancy, piles of money on top of piles of money. All to study climate change, which, according to the theory, should be warming us rapidly, but, according to the data, has stopped.

Ours is a highly adaptable species. Human beings have survived climate changes for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess we could struggle on as usual without financing exorbitantly expensive investigations into a phenomenon we know perfectly well we cannot control.

The Oil Pollution Act 1990 makes the President wholly responsible for cleaning up an oil spill.

Jim Campbell at Canada Free Press tells us more about what the law says:

Amended Section 311 of the federal Clean Water Act. Section 311 now provides in part that:

(A) If a discharge, or a substantial threat of a discharge, of oil or a hazardous substance from a vessel, offshore facility, or onshore facility is of such a size or character as to be a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States (including but not limited to fish, shellfish, wildlife, other natural resources, and the public and private beaches and shorelines of the United States), the President shall direct all Federal, State, and private actions to remove the discharge or to mitigate or prevent the threat of the discharge.

(B) In carrying out this paragraph, the President may, without regard to any other provision of law governing contracting procedures or employment of personnel by the Federal Government–

(i) remove or arrange for the removal of the discharge, or mitigate or prevent the substantial threat of the discharge; and

(ii) remove and, if necessary, destroy a vessel discharging, or threatening to discharge, by whatever means are available.

For a picture of the sheer panic now gripping the White House  –  comic  in contrast to the appallingly serious consequences of the oil spill itself – read this account in the Washington Post. Of course that newspaper doesn’t intend its report to be funny. It intends to show how hard the administration is trying to cope with the crisis, and suggest that it’s really tough on the poor [actually plain incompetent and managerially inexperienced] president. But it’s irresistibly Keystone Kops laughable all the same.

Examples:

The administration is now scrambling to reclaim control, the appearance and the reality of it, over a situation that defies both.

It has been a hasty and somewhat chaotic mobilization of a wide array of disparate government resources — including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the military …

The new normal at the Obama White House has required that a whole new schedule be laid on top of the old one. There is a daily oil-spill conference call for Cabinet officers, one for their deputies, yet another with the governors of affected states, and sometimes as many as three briefings a day that include the president himself. …

Though every day is jammed with interagency conference calls and a river of e-mails in between, some officials complain that at times they still feel like they are talking past each other. …

Signals get crossed. On Wednesday, the Minerals Management Service approved two shallow-water drilling permits, only to reverse both the next day, along with those for three other shallow-water operations. Some officials in the Gulf Coast region have complained that they can’t figure out what the administration’s drilling policy really is these days. …

In his radio address Saturday, Obama enumerated the scope of his endeavor to contain the damage, including 17,500 National Guard troops; 20,000 personnel protecting the waters and coasts; 1,900 vessels; 4.3 million feet of boom.

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll …

The president has pressured other oil companies to step up… [expecting] the entire petroleum industry to dedicate its engineering talent to fixing the spill and preventing others. …

But Obama and his team are still feeling their way, and it is not at all clear what this vast marshaling of resources will accomplish. …

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has launched criminal and civil investigations …

The administration is sending as its emissaries officials who have ties to the region ..

White House officials complain, with some justification, that they are caught between contradictory narratives about their handling of the crisis: that the president is not engaged enough in the details of the response, or that he is getting bogged down in them; that he should spend more time in the gulf making common cause with its residents, or that his repeated trips down there are merely publicity stunts.

And there remains the question of whether, for all its efforts, the administration can really gain control, or even the illusion of it. …

The White House is so well insulated against the danger of information seeping or wafting into it, that the administration has not heard of Climategate, the discrediting of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, or the crippling cost of enforcing CO2 reductions on industry and agriculture in this time of economic crisis. Or so it seems.

One thing is sure. To save the planet, we incurable polluters of earth, air, and water will just have to pay more for the food we go on obstinately consuming.

Here the Heritage Foundation reports, not on the rise of food prices for domestic consumers, but on how environmental protection by means of new draconian regulations will damage agricultural exports – which can only do more harm to the economy and so to all of us.

Although global warming legislation looks less likely for the foreseeable future (though the President and some Senators are trying to revive it), there is an ongoing attempt to impose this agenda via regulations. The EPA regulations that would apply to stationary sources pose a threat to American agriculture. …

In some respects, EPA regulations would be even worse for farmers than cap and trade. Cap-and-trade legislation would have targeted energy companies and not individual farmers, though the higher energy costs would have been passed on to them [and by them on to the consumer]. But EPA regulations would be directly imposed on farmers, imposing tremendous paperwork and compliance burdens as well as energy cost increases comparable to those inflicted by cap and trade.

Such unilateral action would also put American agriculture at a competitive disadvantage relative to the rest of the world. No other country has contemplated imposing anything like the EPA’s regulatory scheme on its farmers. Thus, the EPA’s regulations would make it harder for American farmers to compete in international markets because they would face higher operating costs.

A number of bills have been introduced to limit the EPA’s authority to impose global warming regulations. Some seek to amend the Clean Air Act to preclude this statute from being used to regulate on the basis of global warming concerns. Others are resolutions of disapproval by which Congress specifically rejects the EPA’s endangerment finding. Other bills seek to delay implementation of EPA regulations until further study has been completed.

American agriculture already faces a number of challenges, and the EPA’s anti-agriculture global warming policy would make the future for farming even dicier. For the sake of America’s farmers, the EPA’s global warming regulations should be stopped.

Obama is prepared to damage the economy even more than he has already. He threatens through his officials that if he doesn’t get his way with cap-and-trade, he will take steps that will ‘deter investment’. But then if he does get his way with cap-and-trade, the economy will be grossly harmed anyway. Whose economy is it that he’s threatening? Is it not the economy of the country he leads? So why would he want to wreck it?  The answer is not hard to find. Look to Copenhagen, where the rampaging Left is using false science to try and impose ‘world governance’.  This was to be the moment when international socialism triumphed. It’s been spoilt by exposure of the scientists’ deceptions. The global warmists/global government conspirers are fighting mad. They’ll wreck anything, everything, to achieve their hellish aim.

From Fox News:

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining that the EPA’s new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending in Congress, not replace it.”This is not an ‘either-or’ moment. It’s a ‘both-and’ moment,” she said. But while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won’t be pretty.

“If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

Climate change legislation that passed the House is stuck in the Senate, but the EPA finding Monday was seen as a boost to the U.S. delegation in Denmark trying to convince other countries that Washington is capable of taking action to follow through with any global commitments.

The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide “compensation” for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of “uncertainty” generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge “deterrent to investment,” in an economy already desperate for jobs.

“So, passing the right kind of legislation with the right kind of compensations seems to us to be the best way to reduce uncertainty and actually to encourage investment,” the official said.

Republicans fear that the EPA will ultimately end up stepping in to regulate emissions — though many oppose the congressional legislation as well. They had urged Jackson to withdraw the finding in light of leaked e-mails from a British research center that appeared to show scientists discussing the manipulation of climate data.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the “scientific fascism” ends.

Go, James, go!

From PowerLine:

In 2007, the Supreme Court decided that carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It therefore held that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had not only the power but the duty to regulate this gas. Thus, nine unelected individuals issued, in effect, a directive to the executive branch.

Yesterday, the bureaucrats at the EPA announced that carbon dioxide and several other gases pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and that, accordingly, EPA would begin writing regulations to reduce emissions. EPA’s administrator added, however, that she would prefer that Congress pass legislation to accomplish the same task.

Thus, the executive branch, in response to a directive from judges, is now attempting to pressure Congress into taking action that, from all appearances, Congress does not want to take.

If this is democracy, it seems like a new kind of democracy.

Not only that, but what makes the Supreme Court an arbiter of scientific proof? It should have refused to hear the 2007 case on the grounds that it is incompetent to judge it.

Now the EPA has been granted dictatorial powers to meddle in every American’s private life. A government that does that is asking for mutiny.