You may want to think twice before taking your next deep breath. Every time you exhale, you’re supposedly endangering the planet -- by contributing to global warming.
The Environmental Protection Agency says global warming poses a “serious threat to public health and safety.” That sets the stage for the EPA to regulate, through the Clean Air Act, almost anything that emits carbon dioxide.
CO2, of course, is a naturally-occurring gas. It’s produced whenever a person breathes and, yes, whenever we use any sort of fossil fuel. Driving a car, mowing a lawn, boiling a cup of water, even flipping on a light switch (thus using electricity generated in CO2-emitting power plants) produces carbon dioxide. Yet in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide may be considered a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act -- thus giving the EPA the authority to regulate it.
Last year the EPA issued an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” (ANPR) that shows it plans a strict regulatory regime for CO2. The ANPR and its supporting documents run to 18,000 pages. The level of detail suggests that the EPA has already decided to impose regulations unprecedented in their cost, complexity and scope.
Unelected federal bureaucrats could soon be demanding that manufacturers change how they design their products and insisting that all vehicles meet higher fuel economy standards. In fact, the ANPR outlines just such restrictions in detail. But the agency doesn’t stop with moving objects.
Its restrictions also would apply to as many as a million buildings, 200,000 manufacturing plants and 20,000 farms. And dealing with the EPA is no picnic. Strict agency regulation typically imposes an average of $125,000 in costs and requires companies to spend 866 hours every year to complete its bureaucratic forms.
Of course, these regulations would weigh down our already-sagging economy.
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