This story is disturbing. The overreaching of government.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s pending global warming regulations are no “end run” around Congress, as many conservatives are charging. This time, Congress is being held hostage by its own laws.
The real story is the decades-long campaign by environmentalists to weave a legal web all but compelling the government to enact strict new climate change rules.
In 1970, before global warming was even on the radar map, Congress in the Clean Air Act gave the EPA the power to regulate air pollutants that damage “weather” and “climate” from automobiles and other moving pollution sources.
Members of Congress debating the law barely mentioned this language, according to a book about the law by environmental law professor Arnold Reitze. Meanwhile, a government report discussed the possibility that pollution could lead to another ice age.
It wasn’t until 1990 that the issue came to the forefront again, this time when Congress enacted a major update to the Clean Air Act. Then, some liberals in the Senate fought to require controls under the law on “greenhouse gases” thought to cause global warming. The provision was stripped from the bill in Conference Committee.
But in the last few years of the Clinton administration, the Carol Browner-led EPA issued a legal memo laying the groundwork for regulating global warming under the Clean Air Act’s existing language.
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