EPA's Policies Have Stymied Innovations

The EPA is one of the most retarded and useless agencies we have. For example they have refused to allow the genetic engineering of bacteria and fungus that might have been able feed on the oil and change it thereby to something less noxious for the environment. Why do we even have an Environmental Protection Agency if it's not to PROTECT the environment? Seems like an oxymoron.

I dislike President Obama's style and substance. A whiner and left-wing ideologue, he is remarkably slow-witted when out of range of speechwriters and teleprompters. I'll say one thing for him, though: He brings a sense of irony to government.

The latest example is the incomprehensible choice of William Reilly, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to co-chair the presidential commission to investigate the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

During Reilly's tenure, the EPA implemented policies that prevented the development of a high-tech method to mitigate the effects of the oil washing onto the magnificent beaches along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida.

During the 1980s microorganisms genetically engineered to feed on spilled oil were developed in laboratories, but draconian federal regulations discouraged their testing and commercialization and ensured that the techniques available for responding to these disasters remain low-tech and marginally effective.

They include methods such as deploying booms to contain the oil, spraying chemicals to disperse it, burning it and spreading absorbent mats.

At the time of the catastrophic 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, there were great expectations for modern biotechnology applied to "bioremediation," the biological cleanup of toxic wastes, including oil. Reilly, who at that time headed the EPA, later recalled:

"When I saw the full scale of the disaster in Prince William Sound in Alaska ... my first thought was: Where are the exotic new technologies, the products of genetic engineering, that can help us clean this up?"

Reilly should have known: Innovation had been stymied by his agency's hostile policies toward the most sophisticated new genetic engineering techniques. The regulations ensured that biotech researchers in several industrial sectors, including bioremediation, would continue to be intimidated and inhibited by regulatory barriers. Those policies remain in place today, and the EPA's anti-technology zealots show no signs of changing them...READ: Obama Slips Up on Oil Spill Panel" at IBD editorials.

This Administration's Pure Dishonesty Regarding "Global Warming"

If you still are unsure about the depths of dishonesty of Obama and his gang in Washington please read Strassel's piece at the WSJ. Truth will come out and it appears that it's starting to do so now. These people at the EPA will do ANYTHING to silence even a hint of dissent about the gospel of global-warming according to the EPA! The road to serfdom starts in Washington....beware.

In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an "endangerment" finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it -- even if Congress doesn't act.

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate." Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest. (READ HERE)

Cap and Trade Is Bad For Industry and Therefore For Humans

Let's get something straight once and for all. Every living thing on earth breaths out CO2 - carbon dioxide. That is a fact and if you want to get rid of CO2 in the air then you have to get rid of all living things. It is one of the basic constituents of the atmosphere and a substance all living things breath out even plants. How can you call that a pollutant? This is nothing more than a power grab by the government - Americans have been losing their freedoms for decades but now the game is getting stepped up a notch. One of the biggest attackers of freedom, the EPA, has industry in their sights and unless we start understanding the consequences of this Cap and Trade scheme we will be living sorrier lives in the near future.

Robert Tracinski at The Intellectual Activist writes:

"But following the implication of this "everything is pollution" premise, the court concludes that the "EPA can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change." If emitting carbon dioxide is not explicitly permitted by the EPA-then it is assumed to be forbidden. As Jack Wakeland put it to me, the upshot of this ....is that "industrial civilization is guilty until proven innocent."

"This ominous decision overturns the basic rule of a free society. In a free society, that which is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. As philosopher Harry Binswanger once put it, in a free society we live in a sea of liberty, a vast realm of actions that cannot be impeded by government-with only a few small islands marked "off limits," a strictly delimited set of evil actions like armed robbery and check-forging that are banned by government."

AMERICANS UNITE TO PROTECT OUR FREEDOMS NOW-

The Largest Power Grab by the EPA - The Carbon Tax or "Fee"

The Environmental Protection Agency is nothing if not power hungry. But they are also lacking in any kind of integrity. They are planning to call the CARBON TAX a fee. What a nice and innocent word. A fee. The Wall Street Journal has a piece called the "Lawnmower Men" in their "Review and Outlook" section describing this power grab and how we will have no say in the matter. The amount of money that they will steal from Americans is mind boggling as they plan to charge a "fee" for use of everything under the sun - boats to planes and lawnmowers to tractors. Anything with an engine. Wrap you head around that one.

Al Gore blew into Washington on Thursday, warning that "our very way of life" is imperiled if the U.S. doesn't end "the carbon age" within 10 years. No one seriously believes such a goal is even remotely plausible. But if you want to know what he and his acolytes think this means in practice, the Environmental Protection Agency has just published the instruction manual. Get ready for the lawnmower inspector near you.

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...

...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.

AMERICA WAKE UP AND LOOK INTO THE FUTURE! IT IS ONE THAT WILL BE RULED BY LITTLE MEN IN WASHINGTON. Is this what our Founding Fathers shed blood and lost treasure for? That we, The People, should be stripped of our wealth for the imaginary evil of carbon dioxide? If ever there was a time to protest and send these bureaucrats back to cower under their rock this is it. Americans Unite to Protect Our Freedoms! (READ WSJ)