More Hot Air

(Cartoon by Bill Schorr (2013) and found at Cagle cartoons.  Click on image to enlarge.)

There are some benefits to getting old.  The biggest one to my way of thinking is that in all likelihood I will miss the coming environmental cataclysm.  In my less selfish moments, however, I worry about what the coming generations will face as a result of the mistakes made by my generation and the ones before mine with respect to the environment. Sometimes sadness damn near overwhelms me as I see those mistakes being repeated time after time by the greedier and more short-sighted people currently running the world.

From the 2/22/14 L.A. Times:

The Obama administration's drive to regulate greenhouse gases could hit a snag at the Supreme Court next week as industry groups and Republican-led states ask justices to block what they call a "brazen power grab" by the president's environmental regulators.

Amid legislative inaction in a deadlocked Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted regulations in 2011 that require new power plants, factories and other such stationary facilities to limit carbon emissions.

The agency said the rules were justified by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that held that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — seen as the chief culprits behind a warming planet — are air pollutants subject to EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act. ...

Now, the dispute is back for Round 2 in the high court in a legal fight over how far the EPA can go in adapting the 1970s-era antipollution law to the 21st century's gravest environmental problem.

It is also a political fight, with a partisan lineup similar to the healthcare case two years ago. ...

...when the EPA tried to expand those rules to stationary facilities, industry leaders and Republican-dominated states argued that the agency had gone too far. Justices agreed last year to consider six different appeals of the rules.

Typically, stationary facilities would include power plants, but the challengers said the regulations could potentially extend to millions of others, including hospitals, shopping malls and universities.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the new rules, if put into full effect in 2016, would "erect the costliest, farthest reaching and most intrusive regulatory apparatus in the history of the American administrative state."   [Emphasis added]

Apparently the members of the Chamber of Commerce and oil industry groups don't much care about their own kids' and grandkids' future.  Maybe they are banking on their wealth and connections to keep their own families warm enough and cool enough inside their air conditioned estates, regardless of the conditions outside. 

I'm not so sure their gamble is going to pay off in quite the manner they think.