The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s limits on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide were upheld by a federal appeals court.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled today that the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act was “unambiguously correct” and that the opponents don’t have the legal right to challenge the so-called timing and tailoring rules.
The panel considered challenges to the agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that endanger human health and to rules determining when states and industries must comply with regulations curtailing their use.
Companies such as Massey Energy Co., business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and states led by Texas and Virginia sought to stop the agency through more than 60 lawsuits. Some argued that the EPA relied on biased data from outside scientists.
The agency had “substantial record evidence” that greenhouse gases probably caused the climate to warm over the last several decades, according to the ruling.
See? Settled science! Human exhalation and plant food are the causes of global warming. Meaning that, at some point, the courts are likely to uphold an EPA claim that they have the legal authority to exterminate needy plants and human pollutants in order to save the earth.
“In the end, petitioners are asking us to re-weigh the scientific evidence before EPA and reach our own conclusion,” the panel wrote in the 82-page opinion. “This is not our role.”
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had authority to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane under the Clean Air Act if the agency declared them a public danger. The EPA issued an endangerment finding in December 2009, clearing the way for regulation of emissions from power plants, factories and other sources linked to global climate change.
“This is a huge victory for our children’s future,” David Doniger, senior attorney for the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “These rulings clear the way for EPA to keep moving forward under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon pollution from motor vehicles, new power plants and other big industrial sources.”
So you see, it isn’t the role of the court to look at scientific evidence that challenges the scientific evidence that the court used to make its initial ruling. And yes, this is indeed a huge victory for our children’s future. If by “victory” what is meant is “enslavement at the hands of rogue, politicized bureaucratic leftists robbing the market society blind and re-organizing it to suit their whims and egos and hunger for power under the auspices of ‘safety'”.
Virginia and Texas said the endangerment finding should be rejected because the EPA refused to reconsider its decision after learning that some of the data it relied on may have been “manipulated,” referring to findings by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Sorry. One must never surrender authority already given to the State, regardless of how it was given. Because though the State may have been mistaken (or forced to lie, the ends justifying the means and all), at heart it is good and moral and right — and it deserves to expand, if only to save us from the anarchy and filth of human liberty.
And sure, bondage may hurt a little. But in the end, it’s for our own good.
Makes those who live here wish they could do so in a way where the bureaucrats have no real records of them. Undocumented, if you will.
But then, that’s just a pipe dream. Right?
(h/t johninfirestone)
I hope this is the point where Texas tells the EPA to pound sand.
I’m pretty sure Lone Stars would be worth a hell of a lot more than greenbacks, if push came to shove.
In related news, a government panel has recommended “Intensive Counseling”, or maybe better “re-education” for those members of the masses determined to be “obese”.
from the link:
“a federal health advisory panel on Monday recommended that all obese adults receive intensive counseling in an effort to rein in a growing health crisis in America.”
So don’t eat and try not to exhale so much.
“This is a huge victory for our children’s future,”
Their cold, dark, hungry future.
Living in squalor, picking through the ruins — but the air will be so clean!
Y’know, secession looks more-and-more like the only option.
States have no rights and no standing before this Leviathan; neither do we, us mere citizens, whose God-given natural rights and freedoms we traded away to a government which was SUPPOSED to have only “limited” powers.
Every 4 years we elect the best-sounding (because they say what we want to hear) of the power-hungry scum who want to “improve things for their constituents”; then those scum arrive in Washington and do whatever they damn-well please (most often acting AGAINST the interests of those same constituents who elected them just a few months before).
Who of us want to pay taxes to support a Political Leech class whose primary function seems to be conjuring up new “penumbras and emanations” of our Constitution which -amazingly- have the effect of extending their power and control over just-about-everything we might even contemplate doing?
Dear Washington DC (& every Feral Grab’mint official therein): FOAD.
Sadly for the rest of us, only Texas can actually, legally secede, and even they can’t secede as such. They can split the current state into up five additional (or total, I forget) new territories. While the remnant state of Texas (figure Austin) would remain as part of the union, each of the new territories would then have the right, but not the obligation, to apply for admission to the union as new states.
The problem here is one that Jeff has written about a great deal: electing a different president isn’t going to change anything. The president is term-limited: the congress is jam-packed with lifers and so is SCOTUS. They have the luxury of waiting out the guy they don’t like and keep ginning things along as usual.
I didn’t realize the EPA was part of Congress or the courts. I thought EPA was an unelected bureaucracy run amok, which was the kernel of our problem.
In related news, I’m definitely getting that rifle I wanted.
OCBill,
I’m not sure I really care about the legality of secession. I’m not sure I’m calling for outright secession in the first place. I’d rather see a handful of independent states reassert their sovereignty under the terms of the Constitution as it existed when those states agreed to join the Republic. I don’t need Texas to start its own country, as much as I need Texas to disregard and push back against the various mandates and regulations that Washington was never empowered to enact or enforce, FDR’s SCOTUS be damned.
Don’t secede; just ignore. Being fairly confident that the Army is on my side, I see no reason not to defiantly demand, “You and what army?” When that ceases to be the case, I’ll know that all bets are off and it’s time to skedaddle.
We’re talking about the same thing, Squid. The EPA was the brainchild of a congresscritter at some time and now is upheld by the courts.
Don’t secede; just ignore.
Totally agree with this.
Don’t secede; just ignore.
At which point the Feds say, “You know all that tax money we redistribute? Be ashamed if anything was to happen to it.”
The State then has to have the balls to say, “Yeah? We ain’t sending any more your way.”
At which point the Feds say . . . I don’t know. What do they say?
Mr. Governor Romney says in no uncertain terms that the EPA has no business regulating the wee tiny carbon dioxide molecules
This has to be done, and it’s what I’ve been counseling (I know, who am I to “counsel.” But there you go).
I think states willing to do this in the first place would quickly realize they have all the money they need from their own revenues; and that the response of the feds is that they’re big fucking pussies when you call their bluff openly and publicly.
They can only harm you if you continue to buy into the myth of their supreme authority. As I’ve written many times before, once you throw of the shackles of “their game/their rules”, their power all but evaporates.
Somebody has to be willing to do it, though. And unfortunately, most politicians are populists and risk averse, so they are the last people you’d expect to take such initiative.
The people have to press for it, then elect a new breed of politician to represent those interests. Otherwise, you’ll get standard pol types who like the status quo, regardless of team.
You know, I think it would be wonderful if this decision was cited as a precedent allowing whatever fraud and perjury a citizen felt he needed to commit.
The EPA was the brainchild of a congresscritter at some time and now is upheld by the courts.
Actually, the EPA was established by executive order from Nixon’s desk. Sure, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act came from Congress, but when they were passed, there were significant interstate air and water pollution issues that could honestly be considered legitimate federal concerns.
So my ire is directed not at the Congresses who authorized legislation against air and water pollution — it’s directed at an unelected, out-of-control bureaucracy which, finding that it has taken all the low-hanging fruit, decides that it would rather expand its mandate than content itself with maintaining the progress it made. Forty years later, it’s decided that cow farts and human exhalation are within its purview.
(Okay, I will admit to a certain amount of ire toward Congress for continuing to fund the out-of-control juggernaut. But that’s different from the original authorizing legislation.)
The court simultaneously ordered the Clerk, consistent with D.C. Circuit Rule 41(b), to “withhold issuance of the mandate herein until seven days after disposition of any timely petition for rehearing or petition for rehearing en banc.”
http://www.volokh.com/2012/06/26/d-c-circuit-rejects-greenhouse-gas-challenges/
The future of humanity, for the Left, is an ant colony managed as a Panopticon.
At which point the Feds say, “You know all that tax money we redistribute? Be ashamed if anything was to happen to it.”
This threat is the central means by which the Federal leviathan has overwhelmed the formerly independent states. It’s also the EXACT point raised by the story of “The Wild and Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp (now known as what’s-for-dinner)” that you can get to by clicking on the link associated with my name.
Brilliant really. They take our money, and then use it to bribe us, or more accurately to coerce the states into threatening us. The Tenth Amendment is for suckers. See also: helmet laws, seat belt laws, etc.
At least Mark Levin is discussing this. Certainly NRO and the Republican elites won’t. Just looked at NRO’s Corner. Not a peep. Not a CO2-bearing breath.
What point in time is better than now for AZ to tell the Feds to pound sand, followed shortly by TX? Then coal-country WV.
time for an earth hour that lasts a day intentionally.
I’m down with ignore.
They can only harm you if you continue to buy into the myth of their supreme authority. As I’ve written many times before, once you throw of the shackles of “their game/their rules”, their power all but evaporates.
The Wizard of Oz
I’m not fond of “ignore”.
That leads directly to a “nation of men” versus a “nation of laws”. You can argue that we are already in the former place, but I’d prefer that we actually rescind stupid laws versus keeping them on the books and ignoring them.
The future of humanity, for the Left, is an ant colony managed as a Panopticon.
Orwell keeps winning threads, and I’m gonna say that’s not a good sign these days.
[…] then you don’t really have any, and the battle was lost long ago. Jeff just goes ahead and says it: And yes, this is indeed a huge victory for our children’s future. If by “victory” what is […]
I’m not fond of “ignore”. That leads directly to a “nation of men” versus a “nation of laws”.
It is no dishonor to disobey or ignore an unlawful law. We’re talking about massive overreach by the Feds, well beyond their enumerated powers. A few governors standing up for their states and reasserting the sovereignty that has been theirs all along is hardly an invitation to anarchy.
The federal government is the biggest bully in the history of mankind. You seem to think that we’ll get somewhere by talking with it and trying to make it see the error of its ways. I’d rather that a few states stand up to the bully and put it in its place. It’s as simple as that.