And? Why do Republicans hate clean air and clean water? The Hill:
President Obama’s use of executive authority and his Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) interpretation of existing laws might have laid the groundwork for renewed cap-and-trade efforts, political experts said Wednesday.
The courts have approved many of the EPA’s pollution regulations, giving Obama license to propose new rules, former EPA Administrator Carol Browner said during a Politico-hosted panel discussion at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.
She explained those court victories have created momentum that might make industry-specific cap-and-trade plans more palatable than the prospect of facing new regulations. Though comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation might be off the table for now, Browner said that dynamic opens opportunities for piecemeal progress on cap-and-trade.
[…]
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who co-authored cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House of Representatives in 2009 but died in the Senate, said changing realities make it possible for a variation of his massive bill to surface. He pointed to increasing installations of renewable electricity capacity, recently finalized fuel economy standards and U.S. carbon dioxide emissions hitting a 20-year low as developments that would soften the impact of cap-and-trade.
“It creates a climate where there’s a business community that’s on our side,” Markey said.
But for now, that community — along with its vocal Republican allies and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who oppose regulations as an energy tax — is firmly opposed to such efforts, making cap-and-trade a politically toxic non-starter.
Romney said Tuesday in an online questionnaire that the administration’s rules are “imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy” in the name of curbing global warming, an endeavor he said would be ineffective absent coordinated international action. He also derided the president’s support for Markey’s “massive cap-and-trade bill that would have devastated U.S. industry,” adding that when that failed, Obama “declared his intention to pursue the same course on his own and proceeded through his EPA to impose rules that will bankrupt the coal industry.”
With Congress stalled on energy and emissions issues, the administration and EPA have chipped away at emissions by rolling out new rules. That has irked Republicans and the industry, which say the president has abused his powers and that the regulations are economically burdensome.
[…]
Though Romney has pledged to roll back many of EPA’s rules, the courts have generally sided with the administration. That will make it tough for Romney to fulfill his promises, Browner said, noting he could not simply ignore court orders if he were to win the White House.
Browner offered that Obama would use the CWA and CAA to go even further in his attempts to regulate air pollution if he wins a second term. She said he might propose greenhouse gas limits on existing coal-fired power plants, taking a significant leap from the first-ever limits on new coal-fired power plants EPA proposed in March.
“You’re highly likely to see the president and the administration continue to use their existing authority,” she said. She later added, “The president has been willing to use his executive authority … I think you’ll see that kind of leadership.”
Sustained action from EPA might signal cap-and-trade is in the offing, Kevin Book, an analyst with ClearView Energy, said during the panel.
“EPA is on a pathway that may eventually take us to cap-and-trade,” he said.
Backdoor attacks by an imperial president and an unelected bureaucracy on a constitutional framework built around the separation of powers? There’s a new name for that, according to the “progressives”: leadership.
I guess dictatorship or tyranny didn’t have that same nice ring to it.
The plain english word for it is Führerprinzip
We are so completely screwed. Once the progressives get done destroying all energy producing industries, what will be left? Since solar and wind power can’t replace them, we’ll be forced into rolling blackouts until finally the grid will go dark — for everyone except the ruling class, of course. So they can keep tabs on the proletariat. :)
Oh, so Obama can ignore the courts & Congress at will and it suddenly becomes etched in legal stone that no subsequent President can roll back by using the same tactics?
[btw, just back from the twins’ first soccer game of the season & first time they’ve played competitive team sports. Not too bad but definitely needs more work]
Classical liberals have reasoned principles based on a far-reaching grasp of historical experience and a desire for objective truth.
As their tools, Progressives have the seven deadly sins, more or less. Hatred — typically for the GOP and their projections of it — animates them perhaps more than any other of those ills. The whole mess is indifferent to its failures and supremely arrogant about the denied ignorance and apathy that persistently precedes them.
Leftism is therefore a mental condition of varying seriousness and as such cannot and shall not be reformed. It is a disorder.
On the other hand, liberty is the productof the healthy mind’s influences on its surroundings.
This is the height of asymmetry, which includes the complication that the despised GOP is foolish enough to have adopted nearly every plank in the left-center platform, thereby earning that contempt.
Dealing with the left using reason and principle fails. The GOP appeasing it by losing more slowly is madness. It is corralled only by a majority operating with an eternal wariness and at times, a rather extreme prejudice, sharply limited and divided powers among them.
The left shall not be reasoned with. It can only be endured and prevented.
“I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President.”
He’s been chanting this mantra to himself every day since the day he was elected. Soul twisting? You betcha.
Browner is an idiot. Just because the courts say it’s okay for the EPA to do something doesn’t mean that it’s obligated to continue to do so if a new administration isn’t so inclined.
After all, we’re all unitarians now,
executively speaking.
Great. More non value added beak dipping. Like we needed to let MORE air out of the economies tires or more fiction to the axles.
Anything that raises costs and doesn’t increase value is BAD and makes it hard to start and run a business. The harder it is to start and run a business the poorer and weaker we ALL are, and fewer people will eat or have the medicine they need. Supplies will be lower and yet we will all have the same demands. That means people will be poorer or if you try to control prices they will be facing shortages. Rich people who live in a poor society are poorer than rich people who live in a rich society and often end up close to being mere upper middle class of a rich society.
Obama is fucking stupid. Command economies are the product of severe economic ignorance.
““I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President.”
He’s been chanting this mantra to himself every day since the day he was elected. Soul twisting? You betcha.”
Yet he still runs like candidate seeking unknowingly to unseat himself, who he portrays as Bush, who he never actually face in an election. It is his own failed polices he wants to explain away as the ways of his opponent and yet he wants to correct them, extend them, and not face responsibility for them.
I agree that he appeal best to people who are ignorant, confused, or nuts.
that reminds me of a stupid thing I heard last night while channel surfing. Charlie Rhodes was talking to Brokaw and some other “Presidential historian” pundit type guy (Meacham?) And Mr. Pundit opines on every President’s three or so chances to rise above the typical politics of the era.
His example of G. H. W. Bush’s rising above it all? Breaking the “read my lips” promise, which, according to Mr. Pundit, Bush knew would cost him the reelection. He and Brokaw then proceeded to compare that to Johnson saying Civil Rights would cost the Democrats the south, but it was the right thing to do.
Irritating on so may levels. But no doubt appealing to the ignorant, confused and nutty.
Wow. I did not do well with my temporal and plurality conjugation there! Face-> faced, appeal -> appeals.
Progofascists?? Envirodascists??
Envirofascists, dang it.
I guess dictatorship or tyranny didn’t have that same nice ring to it.
****
From TV’s Big Bang Theory (from memory)
Howard: Sheldon is being a huge dictator.
Raj: You don’t need to be so mean about it.
Howard: I added “-tator”!
[later]
Raj: You’re right: he’s being a total Dickensian.
On the other hand, liberty is the productof the healthy mind’s influences on its surroundings.
All it takes is the realization that critterses are better off fending for themselves in the wild—despite the risk—than languishing in your vanity zoo.
But for some, the vanity zoo is all they have in terms of self-image, so the vanity zoo it is.