Barack Obama and John McCain have both pledged to make greenhouse gas reduction one of their administration’s top environmental policy priorities. But Obama takes this pledge far beyond mere policy by making it the occasion for an unprecedented end-run around Congress. He will do so via the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is literally poised to become the advance element of Big Brother intrusiveness, a virtually unaccountable federal agency that will monitor and regulate the most minute details of American life.
Top Obama energy adviser Jason Grumet told Bloomberg News recently that if the new Congress does not declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant within 18 months after Obama is inaugurated, the new president will direct EPA to do so unilaterally. This means that any human activity that creates carbon dioxide — a natural substance we exhale and plants require for photosynthesis — would fall under EPA’s purview. If that doesn’t scare you, it should.
This is not a hypothetical concern. The apparatus is already in place for EPA to monitor every person’s “carbon footprint” — right down to their lawnmowers — and impose massive new taxes and draconian regulations, all in the name of environmental purity. This despite growing evidence casting doubt on the conventional liberal wisdom about global warming, and the likelihood that pay-offs for large carbon dioxide reductions would be negligible. According to a widely accepted estimate, the earth’s surface temperature would only drop 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years.
But it won’t take anywhere near 50 years to see the destruction that will be wreaked throughout the U.S. economy if Obama acts as promised through EPA. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates the proposed rules would double gas prices and raise the price of electricity sixfold. Not only power plants and factories would be affected: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says at least a million mid-sized restaurants, hospitals, hotels and churches would be, too. Because carbon dioxide is released in 85 percent of all U.S. energy production, the carbon police will force everybody to drastically reduce their emissions — or pay a hefty price.
How hefty? The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis estimates that EPA’s proposed carbon caps would reduce U.S. GDP by $6.9 trillion over the next two decades and kill 2.9 million American jobs. The added federal red tape would drive up prices and greatly diminish the American standard of living, as well as the nation’s ability to compete with foreign companies with no such restrictions. The U.S. would lose a century of economic progress and incalculable economic liberty. And all for 0.14 degrees?
