A friend of mine won’t eat shrimp unless she knows its country of origin. This is because she heard that some chicken farms in China place their mesh-bottomed coups over shrimp ponds, feeding the shrimp with chicken droppings. Another friend of mine deadpanned “What’s wrong with that? They’re reducing their Carbon Footprint.”
Since liberals fear Al Gore-style global warming hype more than even terrorism, and they control the legislative and bureaucratic halls of government, the regulatory regime is seriously on the move at both the federal and state level to as much as triple the cost of every product, service or activity.
In fact, the federal EPA and the California Air Resources Board this week issued draft regulations that shed considerable light upon the brave new world where government would exponentially increase the cost of every product or service and control everything from landfills to lawnmowers.
According to Jeremy J. Broggi, Associate Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, the President in April “warned that the Clean Air Act and other existing statutes were the wrong way to address climate change, as they were designed to deal with local and regional pollutants, not global greenhouse gases. At the same time, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell said that regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act would result in ‘a glorious mess.’ The EPA staff draft confirms that the President and Chairman Dingell were right.”
According to this report in the Wall Street Journal, “In a huge document released last Friday, the EPA lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Central planning is too artful a term for the EPA’s nanomanagement. Thankfully none of it has the force of law – yet. However, the Bush Administration has done a public service by opening this window on new-wave green thinking like Mr. Gore’s, and previewing what Democrats have in mind for next year.”
The report details how judicial supremacists, along with the unelected, unaccountable activist bureaucrats in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have circumvented the separations of power to block the administration (which is no haven for global-warming skeptics) in having a say in how greenhouse gases will be regulated in America into the future.
The CARB draft regulations, pursuant to Assembly Bill 32 of 2006, can be found here.
Last week, the County of San Bernardino approved a contract for $321,059 to prepare a Countywide Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Plan in compliance with the county’s 2007 settlement with Attorney General Jerry Brown in response to Brown’s lawsuit against the County’s General Plan update on grounds that it didn’t adequately address greenhouse gas emissions. I was the only member of the Board of Supervisors to vote against the settlement, because I believe local governments should be resisting these ridiculous power grabs, not facilitating them. Read my opinion piece from the time here.
With the recent decline in the housing market, the economy is currently hanging on to a small amount of growth. Now the EPA, with the authorization of the Supreme Court, has the ability to bring the economy to its knees. The true danger of the Supreme Court’s decision in Mass. v. EPA, as noted in the dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia, is the Court’s determination that everything deemed a “pollutant” is a danger to the public. As Scalia states, this pollutant standard applies to everything “from Frisbees to flatulence”.
Funny as it may sound, under the new court-imposed law, the EPA is now required to regulate flatulence, mainly from livestock. The joke ends when the EPA begins to regulate California’s massive food industry. Currently, the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the year-to-year costs of food, is expected to increase from 4.4% (2007) to 5.4% (by the end of 2008)(Source: USDA) – the largest increase in food prices since 1990. Worldwide, food prices have increased as much as 75% in the past year.
If the EPA decides to regulate the large farms in the California, whose agricultural industry generates nearly $100 billion in economic activity, and consider cows the primary source of pollution, the CPI for food will increase dramatically. It would not even take new regulations from the EPA. America’s farmers both inside California and across the country will take note, the result being large price increases from the unknown costs they will incur in the future because of possible regulations. The consumer may very well see a doubling or even a tripling of meat prices in short order. The EPA now has the legal authority to hamstring the agricultural industry in the United States, just by opening an “inquiry” into how to reduce flatulence emissions from cows in California. So much for “happy cows”.
Finally, just today I was briefed on how the state and federal AB 32 and “cap and trade” greenhouse gas regimens will likely double the cost of manufacturing cement and even disposing of trash. Makes me wonder how I will explain to my constituents how refuse collection fees may double or triple and road projects may be delayed years more than our most dire projections had previously anticipated in order to reduce the global temperature by one degree over the next hundred years. And even that won’t come to pass because China and India and Russia would never kill their own golden geese, especially when America is so willing to shoot its own hostage without even a pretense of negotiation.