The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 by Richard Nixon, and tasked with protecting human health and the environment. As the decades have drawn on, the EPA has been given greater and greater power by congress; with the most recent the Clean Air Act in 1990 signed by President Bush the elder. That act gave the EPA broad-reaching powers to protect the environment by defining pollutants and the freedom to act to limit and reduce them. But has the agency overstepped its bounds?

Under President Bush, the expansionist tendencies of this agency were restrained, such as their desire to declare CO2, a common gas exhaled by all humans and required by plants for survival, a pollutant. The theory behind this is that it would allow the EPA to act to limit “carbon emissions” which are blamed for global climate change according to some scientists.