As the high priests of gaseous emission gather in Copenhagen to determine how much they would like to tax and regulate the economically productive countries of the earth, Obama’s squadrons at home are preparing to tax and regulate the second half of your breathing cycle.
That’s right, folks: any day now, The Wall Street Journal reports, the Obama administration is expected to “declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.”
Well, isn’t that just too bad?
Carbon Dioxide is a trace gas. There just ain’t that much of it around. It accounts for about .038 percent of the atmosphere, which high school science will have told you is mostly nitrogen (78 percent) and oxygen (21 percent). Nevertheless, carbon doxide, though trace, is essential. It is a critical component of the carbon cycle. You remember our friend the carbon cycle: “All life is based on the element carbon.”
Plants use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide to carbon-based sugar molecules. You eat the plants and absorb the carbon. Every breath you take releases a bit of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The fuel you burn to keep warm or drive your car also releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The plants thank you: they couldn’t live without it.
The Obama administration doesn’t thank you, though. It believes carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant.” The Environmental Protection Agency may be about to issue an “endangerment” finding about carbon dioxide. Spotted Owls, certain whales, now the atmosphere as a whole. They take a broad view of their mandate at the EPA. If it issues such an endangerment finding, that could (as the WSJ reports)
pave the way for the government to require businesses that emit carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to make costly changes in machinery to reduce emissions — even if Congress doesn’t pass pending climate-change legislation. EPA action to regulate emissions could affect the U.S. economy more directly, and more quickly, than any global deal inked in the Danish capital, where no binding agreement is expected.
What does that mean for you? More government intrusion in the economy, i.e., more government intrusion into your life. Here’s part of of what it could mean: “top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” as U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue put it.
The irony is that such action won’t do much if anything to repristinate the environment. Their many effect will be to make it more expensive to conduct business. That is, like so much that Obama has done or wants to do, it will make the United States poorer and less competitive.
I am waiting for the day when Al Gore or some other government spokesman decide that the act of breathing — or exhaling, anyway — is itself an infraction of the law against excess carbon emissions. Who will shut up first, Al Gore or his critics? Humans fond of breathing, Unite! You have nothing to lose but these blowhards.
I think, Mr Kimball, that progressives will tie this new ruling into the proposed “Fairness” Doctrine.
In this legislative meld, conservative radio hosts’ speaking times will by law be restricted because, of course, with each word come two blows: arguments against socialism, and more carbon dioxide.
Both are unacceptable.
When I was a kid we joked about the government taxing the air we breathe. Welcome to the brave new world.
Labeling CO2 as a pollutant is yet another demonstration that AGW alarmists lack an intellectual framework that can stand on its merits.
Not that another demonstration was needed. Not that they care, IMO.
Unfortunately, I don’t rule out that the alarmists, like the proverbial stopped clock, might be at least partially correct.
Short of secession, I’d thought nullification was the best hope of preventing the enslavement of my children in the name of environmentalism, scientism, ad nauseam. With the EPA declaring CO2 a pollutant–for starters, it will obviously become more difficult for individual states to nullify federal laws interfering with intrastate commerce and laws regulating every aspect of energy use.
As a registered Republican, I feel deeply betrayed by my party, who engage in parliamentarian games rather than sounding the call to arms before it’s too late. The Democrats would have a tough time paying for a more feckless bunch of straw men than current Republicans, and are every bit as blameworthy for what happens as the Democrats because of their shameless cowardice in ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I wonder if any of them actually know what’s in the Declaration. It’d scare them right across the aisle.
A VOICE FROM THE 19TH CENTURY
“Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot,—taxes upon everything which is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell or taste,—taxes upon warmth, light and locomotion,—taxes on everything on the earth and the waters under the earth,—taxes on everything that comes from abroad or is grown at home,—taxes on the raw material,—taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man,— taxes on the sauce that pampers the rich man’s appetite, and the drug that restores him to health,—on the ermine which decorates the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal,— on the poor man’s salt and the rich man’s spice,—on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribands of the bride,—at bed or board, couchant and levant, we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top,—the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road ; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine which has paid 7 per cent, into a spoon that has paid 15 per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid 22 per cent., and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pound.’ for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble ; and he is then gathered to his fathers to be taxed no more.”
SERIOUSLY? That two year old kid from Indonesia that smokes forty cigarettes is NUTS. Someone needs to kick his parents around, or just launch them into the sea I saw the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TOtoVEJSTU