At a time when the number of people who believe in global warming is declining because the globe isn’t, well, warming any more, the country is having the global warming religion shoved down our throats by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency and their war on coal. How does this happen in a representative republic? Let’s go through how this happened, because the answer is that we are no longer a representative republic.
In two months we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in which he asked for resolve “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” It was a fond hope, wasn’t it?
Leftists have been trying to push regulation of greenhouse gasses for a number of years, but they kept having a problem in doing that, and that problem was Congress, our body of elected representatives. We, the people, wanted no part of it. The science, in spite of outcries from the Left, has never been settled. Furthermore, its implementation would be economically destructive. But, as we all know, the Left tries never to let the concept of representative government get in its way. So in 2005, they decided to band together and try to accomplish, through Supreme Court decision, what they couldn’t accomplish through Congress. Twelve very blue states, three extremely blue cities, and a handful of radical leftist organizations, brought suit. The case, Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency, was heard by the Supreme Court in 2006. In that case, the Supreme Court (an unelected branch of government), by a one-vote majority, gave the EPA (another unelected branch of government) the power to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant and thus to seize power to regulate CO2 emissions. And quite ironically, this authority, they all determined, was granted by the Clean Air Act of 1970. 1970, as I remember, was around the time when we were all being told that we were in danger of a coming ice age.
The years 2009-2010 gave us the most radically Left Congress in the history of the republic. They refused to pass any regulation of CO2 emissions because, even as out of touch as they were with the people, they were not that out of touch. No problem, the job has been accomplished. The EPA, by it’s recent rulings, has imposed regulations on coal-burning power plants that are impossible to implement. Such rulings are extremely destructive, economically. But this is just the beginning. Wait until you fully see the havoc they can wreak on this country and its economy. They have the power given them to impose whatever regulations they deem necessary to protect us against carbon dioxide. Well, at least any carbon dioxide from either industrial or mobile sources. Fortunately, the Clean Air Act of 1970 doesn’t mention regulation of animal life. If it had, the EPA would have been given the power to limit birth rates or even abolish human life altogether. However, when you think about it, with a little creativity they could figure out a way to include that in their powers.
So, government of the people, by the people, and for the people, is history. So sad, isn’t it?
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