Nixon's Dirtiest Trick

Most people know that Dick Nixon was unprincipled. This post will demonstrate how a lack of principles can grow into a very dangerous cancer, indeed.

The WSJ sounds the alarm about Nixon's dirtiest trick: creating the Environmental Protection Agency, which he did as a sop to the Hard Left occupying Congress and the MSM. The Hard Left is still with us, in the same places, although it has metastacized into other places, including the UN and scientific-"research" contractors.

Following a SCOTUS decision that allowed EPA to treat your exhalation (CO2) as a "pollutant," the EPA loosed its Joker-esque proposals.

Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent that under the Court's "pollutant" standard "everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies," which the EPA appears to have taken literally. It is alarmed by "enteric fermentation in domestic livestock" -- that is, er, their "emissions." A farm with over 25 cows would exceed the EPA's proposed carbon limits. So would 500 acres of crops, due to harvesting and processing machinery.

The EPA would regulate "farm tractors" too, plus "lawn and garden equipment." For example, it "could require a different unit of measure [for carbon emissions] tied to the machine's mission or output -- such as grams per kilogram of cuttings from a 'standard' lawn for lawnmowers."

The EPA didn't neglect planes and trains either, down to rules for how aircraft can taxi on the runway. Guidelines are proposed for boat design such as hulls and propellers. "Innovative strategies for reducing hull friction include coatings with textures similar to marine animals," the authors chirp

New or modified buildings that went over the emissions limits would have to obtain EPA permits. This would cover power plants, manufacturers, etc. But it would also include "large office and residential buildings, hotels, large retail establishments and similar facilities" -- like schools and hospitals.

You want the short version? Here it is:

"We expect that the entire country would be in nonattainment."

And, of course, Congress will evade responsibility for the costs.

The EPA thinks it can levy a carbon tax too, as long as it's called a "fee." In other words, the EPA wants to impose via regulatory ukase what Congress hasn't been able to enact via democratic debate.

That's why the global warmists have so much invested in the EPA's final ruling, which will come in the next Administration. Any climate tax involves arguments about costs and benefits; voting to raise energy prices is not conducive to re-election. But if liberals can outsource their policies to the EPA, they can take credit while avoiding any accountability for the huge economic costs they impose

This 588-page document is, without a doubt, the single most aggressive proposal for regulation of human activity ever proposed in the USA. It is comparable to any "Five Year Plan" of Chairman Mao in its scope.

And it is inspired by precisely the same fallacy: that humans are secondary to some other entity. With Mao, it was The State.

With EPA, it is The Ecology.

HT: Moonbattery