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"EPA Global Warming Regulations Could Send Economy Back Into Recession, Report Says"

And we wouldn’t want to do that until after Obama is re-elected.

So thanks for the heads up there, chief!

Regulation of greenhouse gasses by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could reverse the very modest economic recovery and even send it back into a recession, a report from the National Center for Public Policy Research finds.

“These regulations,” author Dana Joel Gattuso wrote, “will have a more severe impact on energy costs, U.S. jobs, household income, and economic growth than cap-and-trade legislation would have had. Furthermore, the regulations could reverse the economy’s direction toward recovery and push us back into an economic slump.”

EPA has considered regulating the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act, which the Supreme Court gave the agency the power to regulate greenhouse gasses in the name of fighting air pollution.

EPA has not yet enacted the types of greenhouse gas regulations Gattuso’s paper warns of, but the agency has announced that it plans to do so in the near future.

“EPA will propose standards for power plants in July 2011 and for refineries in December 2011 and will issue final standards in May 2012 and November 2012, respectively,” EPA said in a December 2010 press release.

Gattuso also reported that GHG regulations would cost the economy jobs, worsening an already bad employment situation. Particularly hard hit would be African-Americans, who would bear a disproportionate share of the job losses caused by the EPA’s anti-global warming regulations.

“The U.S. economy will also stand to lose millions of jobs as energy prices soar and industry is forced to cut back or invest overseas,” the report said.

“Furthermore, the rules will have an unjust and disproportionately large impact on minorities, increasing the number of African Americans in poverty by 20 percent,” it added.

Women and minorites Lock-step Obama voters hardest hit.

But don’t worry. There’s an ap for that.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

20 Replies to “"EPA Global Warming Regulations Could Send Economy Back Into Recession, Report Says"”

  1. cranky-d says:

    Really? Fining us for generating emissions that don’t matter but are ubiquitous, and as a result raising the cost of just about everything would hurt economic recovery?

    Get outta here!

  2. Ernst Schreiber says:

    But don’t worry, it’s not like any of this is intended!

  3. cranky-d says:

    I don’t know what we would do without reports like this to inform us on how the economy can be changed for the worse by onerous and immensely stupid regulation.

    This stuff is so easy a child could figure it out. They mean to destroy us.

  4. DarthLevin says:

    Good news for the Wisconsin union thugs. Breaking a few teabagger heads = carbon footprint reduction … for the children!!!.

  5. Squid says:

    Wow. That Truthout piece is magnificent. A long, tedious piece of agitprop bemoaning and condemning the agitprop it opposes. A “thorough” examination of the molding of popular consciousness by a contrived media narrative that wholly ignores the structures that drive the overwhelming narrative that conforms to Truthout’s principles, such as they are. A study of the existence of a class struggle in the shadows, and a call to return that aggression in kind, without any hint of awareness about the actual class struggles happening right under their noses. And the conclusion of this 5,000-word tedium?

    A grassroots-based movement, as opposed to the billionaire-controlled, top-down Tea Party, will be able to effect progressive rather than regressive programs. It is ironic that the wealthy elite recognize the value of neighborhood organizing while the left ignores this base.

    There are useful idiots, and then there are tools perfectly crafted to achieve the ends of their masters. Mr. Pirsch stands as a shining example of the latter.

    Oh, Lordy. It gets better! Mr. Pirsch’s bio: Michael Pirsch was a union activist and union organizer for over 25 years and a D.J. on Berkeley Liberation Radio, a pirate radio station. He now lives as an economic refugee from the US in Thailand.

    That’s just too precious!

  6. DarthLevin says:

    He now lives as an economic refugee from the US in Thailand.

    Hm. I wonder how much scratch an “economic refugee” pulls in. And does it come with an expense account for the Thai ladyboys?

  7. Squid says:

    Honestly, the guy quotes from Chavez and Galeano with a straight face. Here’s the latter:

    Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few. More and more have the right to hear and see, but fewer and fewer have the privilege of informing, giving their opinion and creating.

    Because, you know, simply nobody is going to read, share, or discuss Mr. Pirsch’s tedious Marxism in the public arena. No communications infrastructure has evolved in the past 20 years to give voice to the masses. Nuh uh.

    The irony is that Pirsch actually advocates for a number of things that I agree with. Neighbors looking out for neighbors. Legal and medical services provided by volunteers on a local basis. Alternative media to provide news and information outside that deemed “newsworthy” by the traditional gatekeepers. Why do Pirsch and I advocate these things and yet disagree on so much? I can’t help but suspect that it’s because I want communities to have local control over themselves, while Pirsch wants nothing more than fresh troops for his community organizing campaigns.

    Where I want a local group that can provide coaches and umpires for Little League, Pirsch wants a local group that can shake down the “rich folk” from the other side of the tracks to pay for coaches and umpires.

    Does he claim the Tea Party to be controlled by billionaires because making up such a lie suits his purposes? Or does he genuinely believe that no group could spontaneously form to look after its own interests, without there being a controlling power figure calling the shots? Given the history and the arguments of guys like Pirsch, it’s an open question.

  8. geoffb says:

    This “critical” part is as far as I needed to go.

    An essential element in a democracy is the development of a critical consciousness that allows us to resist succumbing to the siren call of the propaganda apparatus. Hugo Chavez, in a 2003 interview, spoke of the need to develop critical thinking:

    It seems to be part of a larger social defect in the US – that’s a society that should really develop some kind of response to the intellectual battering that seems to take place daily. I sincerely hope that one day the US public will develop some kind of critical consciousness, that they will remove the veil from their eyes and see the media powers for what they are. No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity. They must be critical, and make it their personal responsibility to humanity and morality to discover the truth.[2]

    Eduardo Galeano, well-known Latin American author and critical thinker, continued in the same vein:

    Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few. More and more have the right to hear and see, but fewer and fewer have the privilege of informing, giving their opinion and creating. The dictatorship of the single word and the single image, much more devastating than that of the single party, is imposing a life whose exemplary citizen is a docile consumer and passive spectator. Never before have so few fooled so many.[3]

    Have we reached criticality yet?

  9. cranky-d says:

    You are apparently a “critical thinker” if you embrace Marxist idiocies. I guess I’m not a critical thinker, then.

  10. ProfShade says:

    These folks are as entertaining as Fidel on ‘srooms…this is on their front page: “Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity.”

    Jeez, I’m so dense. Never knew Spring was so, well, uh, proletariat.

    I do agree with Chavez about consumer culture, though=> We should be more focused on why Shawn Penn and Oliver Stone movies continue to get funded.

  11. mojo says:

    Look – since the EPA doesn’t actually have the authority to do this shit, as noted by a circuit court, what say we all just ignore the dumb bastards?

    What are they gonna do? Take us to court?

  12. Squid says:

    The important thing to remember is that Teh Won! is on your side, provided that you do not A) produce energy, or B) use energy.

    Paraphrasing some smart guy: “I wouldn’t mind so much that this golf-playing, waffle-eating, racist Church-attending, ‘present’-voting slacker got elected to Washington. What I mind is that he brought all his bloody-minded busybody know-it-all friends with him.”

  13. Matt says:

    Gaea must be preserved from the threat of the ape like creatures that crawl on the surface of the planet.

  14. Pablo says:

    Truthout. Heh. I was stuck by the part where they sound an awful lot like Glenn Beck:

    Edward Bernays, the founder of the modern propaganda industry, described the process:

    Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of … in almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.[1]

    In addition to inventing the propaganda model still in use today, Bernays’ model created support for World War I, first in England and then in the US, calling the war to save Morgan’s billions the war for “making the world safe for democracy.”

    We have been overwhelmed by the propaganda apparatus to the point that it controls our thought processes, causing us to become relentless shoppers, even against our own interests. It controls our thinking in the public sphere so that we support the wealthy elite, even against our own interests. Far too many of us have been rendered thoughtless and clueless as to what it means to live in a democratic society. It is not democracy because the government says it is; it is democracy when the masses are informed and act through their delegates to develop policy that promotes the general welfare.

    That’s roughly The Overton Window. Of course, Pirsch veers around wildly apart from that, once I hit the black/white income figures I got all tl;dr.

  15. BJTex says:

    “Furthermore, the rules will have an unjust and disproportionately large impact on minorities, increasing the number of African Americans in poverty by 20 percent,” it added.

    Not to mention who might not be an African American but runs a particular industry which will be beaten and whipped due to overblown concepts of Global Warming. While these fools have virtually no science to support this fading planetary belief they simply cannot be swayed from this world-pushing concept that puts them in charge of beating up the world’s population based upon … very little scientific. Well, at least nothing happening in a scientific proven sense beyond “too much snow and too much heat means GLOBAL WARMING AEEIIII!!!”

    Our CESMI and his leftist cronies continue to be unhistorical fools. Sez me!

  16. JD says:

    I cannot stand these fuckers. It is funny, not in a hahahahahahahaLOL kind of way, how all of these programs are designed to start after the next election. If they are so important, and good, and vital, why not immediately?

  17. Squid says:

    That’s easy, JD: they needed ten years of revenue against five years of expense if they were to have a prayer of making them look deficit-neutral.

  18. JD says:

    And even then, Squid, they were only wrong (read lying) by a few trillion dollars.

  19. Frontman says:

    Is it coincidental that Gattuso’s lament makes cap and trade look “better” by comparison?

  20. Pellegri says:

    BUT. BUT. 97% of climate scientists agree that the economic impacts will be minor! IT’S TRUE GUYS! How dare we be skeptical!

Comments are closed.