Examiner Editorial: Warning: Breathing causes global warming
Examiner Editorial
March 9, 2009
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson opened Pandora’s box recently by agreeing to reconsider a Bush administration decision that excluded carbon dioxide from the list of pollutants the agency regulates under the Clean Air Act. Human beings and animals exhale the carbon dioxide that plants use in photosynthesis. A byproduct of photosynthesis is normally oxygen breathed by human beings and animals. So to even consider classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant is, to put it mildly, quite a stretch.
Even so, Jackson shows every sign of bending over backwards to satisfy environmental extremists who insist that carbon dioxide is causing cataclysmic global warming. In fact, hundreds of scientists argue the opposite, noting that the Earth’s atmosphere has been cooling for the past 10 years while carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Even so, a small group of unelected bureaucrats in Washington — responding to a farcical U.S. Supreme Court order requiring the EPA to determine whether exhaling is an environmental hazard — are now poised to begin one of the most costly regulatory excesses in U.S. history, which will have profound negative repercussions on every facet of American life.
Jackson’s reconsideration followed the Sierra Club’s appeal of an August 2007 decision by the EPA to grant a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit that allowed Deseret Power Electric Co-op to build a waste-coal-fired electric-generating plant near Bonanza, Utah. Most immediately, Jackson thus stopped work on a much-needed new power plant that met all other Clean Air Act requirements. But if carbon dioxide is declared a pollutant, stopping the Bonanza power plant will merely be the prelude to far greater losses to come as the EPA exercises its newly acquired muscle to regulate every sector of the U.S. economy.
Lets be clear: All household and commercial activities that produce carbon dioxide will be subject to this newly created EPA regulatory monster. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to police 189 actual pollutants. A naturally occurring gas critical to the food chain should not become pollutant number 190 by bureaucratic fiat.
Speaking of the food chain, the California Air Resources Board recently determined that biofuels like ethanol often produced from food crops actually leave a bigger carbon footprint than other sources of energy, including oil, when all indirect factors are taken into account. Following the “carbon dioxide is pollution” argument to its absurd conclusion, the EPA would have to severely limit production of renewable biofuels, which are being expansively funded by the federal government as a preferred form of energy precisely because they produce fewer emissions. The madness takes one’s breath away.
