In
Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled, five to four, that atmospheric pollutants need not be toxic. Justice Scalia chided in dissent that “frisbees and flatulence” are pollutants, based on that ruling.
True pollutants have a demonstrable negative effect on the environment. This narrow, legal interpretation of the Clean Air Act and the 53 to 47 vote in the Senate to uphold the EPA declaration of CO2 as an endangerment, ensure that unless regulation of CO2 emissions--Cap and Trade—is successfully legislated by the Senate, the EPA will regulate CO2 emissions by default. Either way, the nation is destined to experience CO2 regulation and drastically curtailed use of fossil fuels despite growing evidence that natural causes account for most of the observed temperature increase since 1850. Manipulating CO2 emissions will not appreciably alter the earth’s temperature but according to the POTUS, energy costs will “skyrocket”.
The endangerment designation is based almost solely on the IPCC position that CO2 causes global warming and that human activity is the cause. Policy Makers have been led by the IPCC to believe that climate change is settled science and that the warming calamity can be averted only by drastic reduction of greenhouse gasses. Untrue! Without compelling evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the justification for the endangerment declaration collapses and the EPA goal of 83 percent reduction in CO2 emissions over the next century will result in negligible lowering of global mean temperature in any case, and is a staggeringly expensive attempt to solve a non-problem. Several lines of evidence suggest that cyclical Pacific and Atlantic ocean currents account for warming and cooling on a predictable basis without invoking anthropogenic forcing and indicate that the cooling trend that started in 1995 will continue in spite of a steady increase in CO2 concentration. Satellite data is consistent with that view. Thus, CO2 is not a major contributor to warming.