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There is a fascinating exchange on the principle of Experts Decide All Things vs. what we might call subsidiarity from the Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton.
Menton attended a conference at which they were “debating the merits of recent Supreme Court cases that have articulated something called the Major Questions Doctrine as a limit on administrative agency power to promulgate regulations of sweeping import without clear statutory basis.”
An academic lawyer named Sally Katzen defended the side of Experts and the EPA.
Recall first Experts at EPA decided your breath was a pollutant—yes, they did. Carbon dioxide, the very stuff of your breath, the very food of plants, is, Experts at EPA insist, a pollutant. And they were set to shut down all coal and gas because of this Expert ruling.
Blinded, as they were, by “climate change” ideology, and forgetting that carbon dioxide is food for plants. Which I cannot help repeating, as they could not help forgetting. No carbon dioxide, no plants; no plants, no people; no people, no Experts. Photosynthesis is pollution, or something.
You might recall SCOTUS stopped the EPA’s Experts, barely. Katzen commented on the ruling:
Ms. Katzen, her voice dripping with scorn, the Supreme Court has decreed that only the dysfunctional Congress can address the most critical issues facing us. She was particularly critical of the Court having struck down the Clean Power Plan, which in her view was well within the authority granted to EPA under the CAA, as well as being a subject that could only properly be dealt with by people with the necessary expertise, such as the bureaucrats at EPA.
Menton asked what limiting principle, if any, constrains the EPA. Or is it as it seems, that he EPA can do anything it wants, if what it wants is defined, by them, as their Expertise.
Katzen “couldn’t come up with any reason why, if EPA could force the shut down of all fossil fuel burning power plants, it could not also ban all burning of fossil fuels for airplanes, cars, industry, agriculture, home heat, etc.”
He said, “She flatly asserted ‘there are standards’ without being able to specify any of them.”
The best she came up with was “notice and comment rule-making,” which is not a standard, but rather a procedure. It can be a time-consuming and burdensome procedure, and may generate thousands or even millions of comments, but at the end of that the EPA can just go ahead and implement the rule it started with and planned to implement all along. When Professor Katzen says that “EPA is not able to and does not do whatever it has a whim to do when it wakes up in the morning,” she is just plain wrong.
I have been a party to some of these public comments before. A friend of ours, Jim Engstrom, is most diligent about these, and does them frequently, and often asks me and others to submit, too. But I’ve grown cynical about this.
Yes, the EPA asks for comments: but the EPA is free to ignore the public comments it doesn’t like.
The procedure is only that they ask for them, not that they obey or consider them. Obeying would be an affront to the Expertise, and thus impossible to countenance.
About the Clean Air Act itself, Menton says
What is certainly not there is any limiting principle or standard that constrains what EPA may do to effectively ban use of fossil fuel energy in all sectors, once it is accepted that EPA can regulate CO2 as a ‘pollutant.’
Declaring CO2 a pollutant is like declaring a man in a dress a woman. Both have equal scientific validity.
But both are declared by Experts as true. And they have the authority to do so.
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No carbon dioxide, no plants; no plants, no people …
I keep trying to tell my brother … that is the idea
By the way, according to quick searches, the EPA had introduced measures for five greenhouse gasses for Obama (the ultimate expert / expert-in-chief) to approve in December 2009. Obama wanted Congress to do it … (it looks like Obama finally pulled the trigger in August of 2015 (I guess enough time had elapsed since 2009’s Climategate)
Declaring Carbon Dioxide a pollutant was necessary in order to collect “Carbon Taxes”, which wealth confiscation schemes make many people rich; but filthy lucre pales next to raw power: If something is a “pollutant” then something, even anything, that can be done, must be done about it, and that requires the unfettered power of government agencies.
Begin with a propaganda campaign, by calling this clear, clean God-given plant food “Carbon”, making it sound dirty and smudgy; allow Russian and other foreign energy interests to give tens of millions every year to the Sierra Club and other “environmental” orgs to lobby against clean, abundant natural gas; Have a “G-27” where the U.S. pledges $1 billion (just the start) to the U.N. climate slush fund, while calling Communist China, which is the worst polluter in the world, a “developing nation” entitled to a portion of said climate slush fund.
Do I have that about right? Shall we add that prior to the Biden era of decline, the U.S. enjoyed the LOWEST “emissions” amongst all developing nations, due to our natural gas renaissance?
Nevermind, we might have to kill the planet, or at least its bat population, in order to save it:
75% Of German Wind Turbines Kill 70 Bats Each In 2 Months. There Are 30,000 Wind Turbines In Germany. (NoTricksZone)
“Because it is believed (by activists and policymakers) erecting wind turbines has a net positive impact on the Earth’s climate, we can be assured the bat carnage will continue for decades to come.”
I learned the other day that a bat can eat up to 7K mosquitoes in ONE DAY, and they are prodigious pollinators. Wouldn’t it be more “saving” to the planet, to ramp up the natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear, and consign these Communist Chinese manufactured windmills to the dustbin of history?
Oh!
Politifact says it is a fact!
There are “Piles” (their words) of scientific studies which conclude that CO2 and other greehouse gasses are causing global temperatures to rise.
Ann
Here’s the link:
https://notrickszone.com/
So, life on planet earth thrives on a pollutant. I didn’t know that
We must kill the Experts.
It is an act of self defense.
Once we have killed enough of them, I dare say we will have become Experts at it.
Once we are Experts at ending Experts, how will they deny our expertise and literal bodies of evidence that is literally made out of their own Expertise?
They built a bunch of camps for the Covid, right? Now that THE SCIENCE ™ has changed its mind, we ought to repurpose them for Expert containment and control. It will be very orderly and efficient. We’ll also help raise money by having schoolchildren and visitors tour around the perimeter of this new Expert Zoo in Jurassic-park jeeps to witness the Castastrophes of Experts within the electrical chain-linked fence contributing to the cause by offering them the same conveniences and limitations of their lockdown expertise and green energy plans and bug meal plans.
Ann Cherry–to save the curious the trouble of calculating in their heads, I’ve done the arithmetic, and that comes out to around 1,575,000 slaughtered bats every two months, who would otherwise account for the eradication of more than 11,000,000,000 mosquitos. Just in Germany.
And then, how many birds are wiped out?
Ann and Cary
Be careful with your models
Sally Katzen is married to U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit judge Timothy B. Dyk, and they have one child, Abraham Benjamin Dyk. Katzen is Jewish, and she taught at the Temple Sinai in Pittsburgh[3] where her parents Nathan and Hilda Katzen were founding members of the congregation.[4]
Surely, at some point, some zealous defender of the Democracy white supremacists are accused of trying to burn down, will ask why it is fair or just for a member of less than 3% of the American population gets to decide everything.
EPA Wants to Quadruple Tax on Carbon Emissions. “This will correspond to a $2 per gallon gas tax”:
https://www.independentsentinel.com/epa-wants-to-quadruple-tax-on-carbon-emissions/
“The Biden administration has used the Interagency Working Group’s interim value of $51 per metric ton of CO2. But earlier this month, EPA quietly proposed increasing that number to $190.
“……That document estimates the social cost of carbon as $120, $190, or $340 per metric ton of CO2, using discount rates of 2.5 percent, 2.0 percent, and 1.5 percent, respectively. Such rates reflect the weight given to future impacts of climate change.”
So the same people who can’t find their own arses with both hands, can determine “The social cost of carbon” and its “future impacts on climate change” and apply the appropriate “discount rate”…. based upon what, the taxpayer’s skin color?
Given that the “experts” and “officials” are largely men-in-small-hats you’ll be jailed for Holocaust Denial if you keep this up.
Johnno — funny stuff, man.
Re: What Limits Do Experts, quoting Adolf H. (yes, that one): The experts, however, who are stuck in their thought patterns like a spider in a web, incapable of spinning anything other than their eternally same web, just give them a command and you will see that all of a sudden they come up with a completely different design. Experts can always do things differently than they first thought. In the end, it all boils down to the fact that if we are only serious, the experts will surely serve us with the material we need.