Obama Administration Declares The Air You Exhale To Be Danger To “Public Health And Welfare”
Along with four other “greenhouse gases.”
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Environmental Protection Agency concluded Friday that greenhouse gases linked to climate change “endanger public health and welfare,” setting the stage for regulating them under federal clean air laws.
The EPA action marks the first step toward imposing limits on pollution linked to climate change, which would mean tighter rules for cars and power plants.
The regulatory part of this is bad. Once the EPA gets the coal plans (as an example) in its sights, can you imagine what their attempt to regulate the coal industry out of existence will do to our utility bills? Coal is the cheapest source of power in the country. It supplies roughly 51% of our national power grid. Our utility bills will go through the roof, and beyond that direct consequence imagine what it will do to the economy as businesses cope with heavy increases in the amount of overhead devoted to power and fuel?
Can you say “layoffs?”
But the part of this that may be worse is that this opens the door to the trial lawyers. With carbon dioxide, something each and every one of us exhales, listed as a threat to public health the lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork to sue every single business in America that emits these gases. Starting with the power plants first.
Meaning that these businesses, including the power producers, will not only be fending off the government but and endless stream of torts too. All because the government decided to arbitrarily classify certain gases as causing “climate change” despite there being no conclusive evidence to suggest that human activity is, in fact, causing climate change.
What a mess this is going to be.
On a related note, how much carbon could we save from being emitted into the atmosphere if we got all the environmental bureaucrats in the nation to hold their collective breaths in perpetuity?
