American Elephants

Back on Labor Day, President Obama was in Milwaukee.  He vowed to “keep fighting every single day, every single hour, ever single minute, to turn this economy around and put people back to work and renew the American Dream.” Stirring rhetoric or pure puffery?

I, for one, am thoroughly up-to-the-ears with politicians promising to “fight” for this that and the other thing.  Nobody “fights” for anything, they do deals in back rooms.  Obama promises to create and save jobs, as some other governmental department is busily destroying them.  And the claims of “created or saved” jobs was nonsense in the first place. Happened only in a computer program.  GIGO.

The villain, once again, is the EPA.  A new proposal threatens to regulate industrial boilers — the boiler MACT rule.  (maximum achievable control technology standards).  What?  This sounds really technical, but Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency’s agenda is to set industrial policy for the nation. Their pending regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act will extend the federal bureaucracy into every corner of American life.

In an afternoon press conference on December 07, 2009, the EPA announced that the agency had decided that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide pose a threat to human health and welfare.

This was possibly the silliest announcement ever made by any governmental agency in the history of the republic. We breathe out CO2, plants take in CO2, it is one of the basic building blocks of life.  No CO2, no life.  There is nothing that the EPA can do that will have the slightest effect on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. But this is not intended to control CO2, it is intended to control the American economy.  They think big, these people.

The Boiler MACT rule’s impact would be pervasive and damaging.  The United Steelworkers says the proposal “will be sufficient to imperil the operating status of many industrial plants.”  They represent hundreds of thousands of workers in the most heavily impacted industries — pulp and paper, steel, rubber, and more thousands of jobs in the supply chains and in the communities where these factories are located.

Members of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America (ICEA) which represents manufacturers with more than 750,000 employees say “We cannot emphasize more forcefully the need for the EPA to completely rethink this rule.”  Member companies say this proposed rule “will leave companies no recourse but to shut down the entire facility, not just the boiler.”

On top of this, the EPA is planning to revise the current ozone standard under the Clean Air Act.  The Clean Air Act was never intended by Congress to be twisted to such a power-grab.  Even the EPA estimates that the new ozone standard could cost the economy as much as $90 billion.  Another $90 billion in a recession is small change?

It takes a significant amount of incompetence to make such a mess of this economy.  An ideology that hates capitalism, doesn’t understand business, and thinks that everyone should engage in public service and wealth redistribution as the only noble pursuit; busily regulates to get more control for the very people who don’t know how to manage anything, while  eliminating jobs in the pursuit of a green fantasy land.