Using laws for reasons other than their purpose is a sure-fire way to win the hearts of the citizenry because the unelected know so much better than the people and the representatives they have chosen.
Green groups petitioned the Obama EPA to list CO2 as a “criteria pollutant” and set National Air Ambient Quality Standards (NAAQS) but failed in the courts because CO2 is not toxic. That is, it is not directly harmful. Actually, we make in our bodies as the consequence of normal metabolism.
Joe Goffman, a former Obama EPA official, is now responsible for NAAQS as principal deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Air and Radiation. Mr. Goffman was a chief architect of the Clean Power Plan, and a 2014 article from E&E News described him as the “U.S. EPA’s law whisperer. His specialty is teaching an old law to do new tricks.”
Consultants referred by Mr. Goffman told the state AGs that regulating CO2 as a criteria pollutant wouldn’t fly. But they proposed using ozone NAAQS as what one called a “backdoor.” Fossil fuel combustion, motor vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions contribute to ozone. So the EPA could make states reduce CO2 emissions by tightening ozone standards. States might have to outlaw natural gas-powered appliances, gas stations and internal combustion engines to meet stricter ozone standards.
Sixteen Democratic AGs on Jan. 19—a day before Mr. Biden’s inauguration—challenged the EPA’s current ozone NAAQS. Their one-paragraph lawsuit says the standards are “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious and therefore must be vacated.”
Their aim is to hasten a replacement ozone rule that regulates CO2. The Obama EPA often entered into legal settlements with third-parties to bypass procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and impose extralegal regulations. Acting EPA Administrator Jane Nishida showed the Biden team’s cards on March 4 by notifying the Center for Biological Diversity and 350.org that the agency plans to reconsider “the important issues” in its 2009 petition to regulate CO2 under NAAQS.
To sum up, Democratic AGs, green groups and a top Biden environmental regulator are colluding on a plan to impose the Green New Deal on states through a back regulatory door because they know they can’t pass it through the front in Congress.-
To work around the country's rules to your personal ends takes a special kind of arrogance. To do it to impose your own vision despite the structure of the nation is simply tyrannical. -(some from a wsj article)
No comments:
Post a Comment