Barely held by the law

Last week the Supreme court ruled in Massachessetts vs. EPA that the point of the Environmental Protection Agency was to Protect the Environment, even if it meant regulating car mileage standards in a way that would have a barely positive impact on the environment. The Bush-appointed extremists, in the minority this time, argued, among other farts, that since the state of Massachessetts hadn't declared which exact plots of land they were going to lose through rising sea levels, they had no case to bring.

Le Magazine Cretin published a response by Myron Ebell.

"This Supreme Court decision," he explains, "now will cause many people in business and industry — many of whom have been calling for global warming legislation anyway because they hope to get rich off of it by raising energy prices — many of them now who have been opposed will say, 'Well, we need to short-circuit the EPA process, and we need Congress to give us some kind of system to regulate emissions that we can actually live with, not some crazy thing dreamed up by EPA.'"

... In rendering their decision, Ebell adds, the Supreme Court justices have basically said Congress did not know that by passing the Clean Air Act it was giving the EPA regulatory authority over everything in the air — or, as dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia put it, "anything from frisbies to flatulence."

Left unconsidered as a motivational influence for behavior is, of course, the human instinct for survival. Apparently, you only support regulation of fossil fuels that inject such a significant quantity of new carbon into the biosphere that the atmospheric concentration doubled in a century, because:

• (a) You are going to make a lot of money out of the inevitably flawed regulatory process;


• (b) You need to restrain the world's leading economy so that your weak welfare-state European economy can catch up, which it never will;


• (c) You are an extreme lefty with an irrational hatred for the capitalist system and all its successes;


• (d) You are stupid.

Now, if you ask most people's opinion about why they support immediate and powerful regulation on this subject, instead of taking Myron's word for it, it can be summed up by:

• Since all the best experts in the world have predicted -- and shown their early predictions to be true -- that Business as Usual will likely lead to a massive die-off in the era of our children's children, something has got to be done if we care about their lives.

Anyway, why not consider change? It's not as if our lifestyles have gotten much happier in the last 30 years, given the amount of once-only resource depletion, the perpetual warfare, and the unprecedented decline in third world affluence that has occurred.

Maybe it's not working anyway, and climate change is the overwhelming reason why things have to change. No one invented it to justify change. Only people as dishonest as those who get hired by the CEI could: (a) assert that, and (b) suggest that when you have two good reasons to do something, the argument gets weaker.

Meanwhile, the moron who hosted an interview with Chris Horner, one of Myron's pals, began with the latest crazy screwed-up round of lies to emerge: It's all the fault of the sun!

You see, even though none of our satellites in orbit for the last fifty years have detected unexplained changes in solar intensity, there has been atmospheric warming on the distant planets of Mars and Jupiter, measured by some unspecified instruments on some imaginary space probes, so therefore it could happen here right under our nose, not due to the obvious physical laws of thermodynamics.

When are the children going to rise up and put a stop to these policies that are killing the future they have to live in? In order to do so, they have to fully comprehend the following words of wisdom:

Age and treachery will defeat youth and skill.

The entire economic system which they are born into, with its front-loading of debt, gratuitously low-wages for the young, and the massively over-priced stock of property in the hands of the old, is designed to strip them of their youthful vigour and make them work like slaves. Climate change is the ultimate expression of the war between the generations.

We want our lives of great extravagance, and we don't care what shape it leaves the apartment in for the next round of tenants.

If there was any justice in the world, they would come round to us later and demand reparations. Unfortunately, we will be safely dead by then, so there won't be anything they could do to make us pay.