No Stopping Them Now

It's on.  The big power grab, that is.  Carbon Dioxide, that odorless, colorless gas upon which life as we know it on this planet depends, has already been defined as a pollutant by the Environmental Protection Agency.  Yesterday the EPA has taken it one giant step further by declaring carbon dioxide a threat to human health. 

EPA claims right to cut greenhouse gases

By Edward Felker

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday formally declared that greenhouse gases, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, pose a threat to human health and need to be reduced.

The declaration clears the path for the Obama administration to begin regulating emissions from power plants, factories, automobiles and other major sources of carbon dioxide pollution, perhaps starting as early as next year. The announcement, called an "endangerment finding," also makes it clear that President Obama considers climate change legislation to be a top priority, despite opposition from some elements in Congress and on the world stage.

That this EPA finding comes on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit comes as no surprise.  It gives Obama great credibility among the world leaders he would like most to impress.  When he speaks of cutting emissions they'll know he has the power. 

That it comes in the face of the megabytes of devastating private emails, data, and code leaked from University of East Anglia the Climate Research Unit is breathtaking in its arrogance and desperation.  Today's Wall Street Journal editorial explains.

With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon. With this doomsday machine activated, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish what persuasion and debate among his own party manifestly cannot.

This reckless "endangerment finding" is a political ultimatum: The many Democrats wary of levelling huge new costs on their constituents must surrender, or else the EPA's carbon police will inflict even worse consequences.

The gambit is also meant to coerce businesses, on the theory that they'll beg for cap and trade once the command-and-control regulatory pain grows too acute—not to mention the extra bribes in the form of valuable carbon permits that Democrats, since you ask, are happy to dispense.

Time is of the essence.  The EPA rejected any suggestion that it delay its endangerment finding until after the East Anglia the Climate Research Unit email controversy is resolved.  There is good reason for that, since the controversy is unlikely to be resolved in a way that supports treating CO2 as a hazard.  Here is a sample.  My emphasis below.

From: Phil Jones xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: ray bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx


Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Marc Sheppard explains in American Thinker, exactly what "decline" was being hidden.

So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.

First and foremost -- contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the e-mail was sent in November of 1999 should allay any such confusion.

In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists -- those determined by proxy reconstructions.

In a nutshell, proxy reconstruction techniques that were used to arrive at what temperatures might have been centuries ago, were invalidated by comparison to actual temperatures.  Mr. Sheppard found the smoking gun in the program code.

Skimming through the often spaghetti-like code, the number of programs which subject the data to a mixed-bag of transformative and filtering routines is simply staggering. Granted, many of these "alterations" run from benign smoothing algorithms (e.g., omitting rogue outliers) to moderate infilling mechanisms (e.g., estimating missing station data from that of those closely surrounding). But many others fall into the precarious range between highly questionable (removing MXD data which demonstrate poor correlations with local temperature) to downright fraudulent (replacing MXD data entirely with measured data to reverse a disorderly trend-line).

In fact, workarounds for the post-1960 "divergence problem," as described by both RealClimate and Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code. So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer's comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module "Uses 'corrected' MXD - but shouldn't usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures."

Obama presents what could be the last best chance for lefties to impose their version of social justice on the rest of us.  Yesterday through the regulatory power of the EPA, he assumed the authority to regulate emissions from power plants, factories, automobiles and other major sources of "carbon dioxide pollution."  Given past example he will use that power impose his value judgments.  His Pay Czar determines what is appropriate compensation for financial industry executives.  His Car Czar sees fit to dictate who is an acceptable CEO for General Motors.

No need for a House of Representatives.  The Senate is extraneous.  Obama has grasped the power to dictate using the regulatory authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.