June 10, 2010 09:05 PM UTC

Remedial Sen. Lundberg

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• by: ClubTwitty

(Carbon Dioxide is just like really clean oxygen, right? – promoted by Colorado Pols)

COLORADO SENATE REPUBLICANS

Lundberg to Bennet and Udall: please overturn EPA “endangerment” finding

Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, is urging Colorado’s U.S. Senators to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment” finding that carbon dioxide — the very substance human beings exhale — is a danger to the public welfare.

Sen. Lundberg claims to believe that regulating a powerful pollutant is a ‘danger to public welfare’. To the deniers and liars, of course, this argument might make sense.

If there is no such thing as human-caused warming, if ‘greenhouse gases’ are some type of AlGore enrichment strategy, and if America’s future is an eager embrace of old energy–burning more coal, drilling more oil, and digging up (or blading flat) the 16,000 square miles overlaying the Green River Formation to convert the kerogen locked inside of organic marlstone into a synthetic fuel (should that ever be commercially feasible)–then, perhaps, it follows that any regulation that might curtail this activity is detrimental.

To the liars–its all about the bottom line, as long as that bottom line doesn’t have to include the true costs.    

Setting all that aside, however, and not even bothering to discern which Sen. Lundberg qualifies for, or even arguing the merits of the evidence which overwhelmingly supports AGW, there is a fact which remains: there are not only two branches of government.  

“We’re not talking about a knee jerk reaction to an oil spill in the Gulf,” Lundberg said. “We’re talking about the EPA taking authority they don’t have and declaring carbon dioxide a pollutant, which is absurd.”

A resolution to overturn the EPA findings is being offered by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, and is up for a vote this afternoon. Lundberg said he hopes that Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall will let Congress do its job and block what he sees as an unprecedented power grab by the EPA.

“The EPA has already positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy and amend the Clean Air Act, powers never delegated to it by Congress,” Lundberg said. “Enough is enough. We need to restore the constitutional separation of powers and put the EPA in its place.”

That third branch, of course, are the courts.  Specifically the U.S. Supreme Courts, and more specifically the Roberts Court, which found that CO2 is a pollutant, and that the US EPA has authority to regulate it as such.  (The Activist Four, of course, dissented).

The new ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on carbon dioxide emissions is a strong rebuke to the Bush administration, which has maintained that it does not have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and that even if it did, it would not use the authority.

The ruling does not force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate auto emissions, but the agency would almost certainly face further legal action if it fails to do so.

In one of its most important environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 on Monday that the agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in automobile emissions.

The court further ruled that the agency could not sidestep its authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change unless it could provide a scientific basis for its refusal.

My guess is that Sens. Udall and Bennet will do the right thing, and vote against Big Oil Murkowski’s resolution. In the meanwhile, Sen. Lundberg might brush off that 10th Grade civics text book and quit hyper-ventilating.