EPA Announces Repeal of Major Obama-Era Carbon Emissions Rule (nytimes.com) 316
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source: The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama's signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America's efforts to tackle global warming. At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions. The repeal proposal, which will be filed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, fulfills a promise President Trump made to eradicate his predecessor's environmental legacy. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan makes it less likely the United States can fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to ratchet down emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon that international accord.
In announcing the repeal, Mr. Pruitt made many of the same arguments that he had made for years to Congress and in lawsuits: that the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect while courts assessed those lawsuits.) A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the health benefits the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.
In announcing the repeal, Mr. Pruitt made many of the same arguments that he had made for years to Congress and in lawsuits: that the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect while courts assessed those lawsuits.) A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the health benefits the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.
Just pass a executive order repealing all Obama ac (Score:3, Funny)
No need to drag it out we see whatâ(TM)s going on. Having whores piss on a bed that Obamaâ(TM)s was not enough apparently.
Fuck Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
But more importantly:
Fuck you.
Trump is the symptom. You are the problem.
We don't think we're better. We know it.
Re: Fuck Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
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PR and Tesla are talking, apparently
Re: Fuck Trump (Score:4, Funny)
It isn't really 'waking up' when you open your eyes to find yourself immersed in a fantasy world of 4chan memes.
What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal companies **already** get plenty of tax breaks. As do oil companies. And pretty much every goddamn company in the country.
It would be a very interesting, very Republican and very unlikely experiment to roll back ALL the tax breaks.
Let the Invisible hand sort it out.
Sorry, how would that be very Republican? (Score:2)
Not that I'm in favor of letting the invisible hand sort it out mind you. When in anyone's life has a bad situation been made better by leaving it alone and hoping for the best?
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They are also nominally for a balanced budget and lowering the national debt. They don't seem too concerned with that at the moment.
There was a time, too, when they were purportedly the party that were the hard rationalists, not swayed by touchy-feeling, think-of-the-children arguments. (That kind of mamby-pamby stuff was for bed-wetting liberal
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They are also nominally for a balanced budget and lowering the national debt. They don't seem too concerned with that at the moment.
Have they ever been?
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Sure, every time they're the minority party.
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one of the party's central tenets is low taxes on business lead to better outcomes for the country. These sorts of tax breaks are exactly what they stand for.
Without the tax subsidies, solar is cheaper than combined gas cycle--which is insanely low-cost. It's time to let the invisible hand sort it out. Maybe reduce subsidies slowly, sure, but it's time.
Bear in mind I'm pulling an FDR and slapping my own party with the large fact that income plus FICA totals $2,656 billion of revenue in 2016, while 35% tax on corporate profits totals $299.6 billion. Roosevelt said that workers want security in the permanence of their employment, security of their savings, a
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It would be a very interesting, very Republican and very unlikely experiment to roll back ALL the tax breaks.
There is a group of Republicans who want this, and are really in favor of fighting for it. There is another group of Republicans who want the tax breaks, and are happy to vote in more (and more spending too!)
Then there is a group of rational people who realize that if they roll back all tax breaks, they will get voted out of office by people who lost their mortgage interest deduction.
There's a large chunk of Americans who benefit from tax deductions.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a very interesting, very Republican and very unlikely experiment to roll back ALL the tax breaks.
There is a group of Republicans who want this, and are really in favor of fighting for it. There is another group of Republicans who want the tax breaks, and are happy to vote in more (and more spending too!)
Then there is a group of rational people who realize that if they roll back all tax breaks, they will get voted out of office by people who lost their mortgage interest deduction.
There's a large chunk of Americans who benefit from tax deductions.
The invisible hand of the market is going to optimize based on economic considerations, and is usually going to take a shorter term look at things.
Government can, should, and must put its thumb on the scale to coerce optimal or near optimal longer term conditions while preserving individual rights. One of the things government must watch the long term health of is the environment.
Now I'm all for getting rid of tax breaks that are not justified. If you can't say model the whole thing and explain how this or that tax breaks benefit exceeds its cost, then the break should and must go, possibly with a corresponding decrease in overall rates.
Natural gas is what half the carbon of coal? To an extent, coal isn't going to see a miraculous return as long as that is the case, regardless of what Scott does. That doesn't make his actions correct in any way shape or form, just less damaging than they might otherwise be. That is not the invisible hand of the market safeguarding the environment. That is just pure dumb luck.
I am still less than certain if solar and such is at the point where putting it on everyone's houses with batteries is the way to go, but I do think it is something to aspire for, particularly if we can recycle it all. Nuclear is still on my bucket list for base power, but the problem is, you need to be sure that you always have a regulatory and inspection regime that is top notch. Can you imagine the kind of inept regulators a Trump might put in power? They could easily allow another Tepco mess.
Obama did his job by appointing competent people who did their jobs to protect and guarantee the future of our country.
Trump is doing the job he wants done, by saying fuck everything, how can we get some short term gains to make Trump look good and to hell with the long term of the country.
I personally think it is more than that though. Trump is not playing N-dimensional chess. People bend themselves into pretzels to say that, but it seems more and more like the ravings and rantings of someone who needs to be in an adult day care center, and not in command of the nuclear codes. A rational and ethical man does not put someone who hates environmental protections in charge of protecting the environment or someone who can't remember the energy departments name in charge of the energy department.
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Then there is a group of rational people who realize that if they roll back all tax breaks, they will get voted out of office by people who lost their mortgage interest deduction.
The real problem is that people won't vote for things to stay the same. They'll vote for a tax break, or they'll vote against a tax increase, but they won't vote for the tax breaks being eliminated and the tax rates being jiggled so that they pay the same amount of money in the end, because they don't get or lose anything personally. Meanwhile, they shoot themselves in the foot, but they'd have to think past next Thursday (or next April, anyway) to realize that.
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Re: What's next? (Score:2, Informative)
They already tried the punishments for solar and wind in Florida.
And Arizona, too, if I recall correctly.
The insanity shows no sign of ending, instead they are redoubling on their madness. The GOP is the very definition of fanatics.
The thing they don't realize is that states like North Carolina and Maryland are already suing over out of state pollution, states like California are forcing coal owned by their own utilities to shut down, and even Texas and Iowa see the benefits of wind farms.
Coal burned for e
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Or the 70 BILLION per year for oil lane protection (war)?
Or the Medical Cost offset for coal (3 billion)?
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Looks like tariffs on solar imports are next.
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You're making quite the leap here.
So the Trump administration isn't going to illegally punish those who would have been hurt under the CPP, the ones who brought suit to prevent those penalties and were making a successful case that they couldn't have those burdens imposed on them without at least legal authority.
Just because this administration isn't going to punish one group doesn't mean it's going to punish a different one.
It means more fairness under the law, not less.
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every other country on the planet would like to thank the USA for giving us such a generous head start in the renewable energy sector. It surely isn't cheap to hang back and use ancient ultra-polluting forms of energy that will soon be legislated out of existence, and we appreciate it!
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When will this insanity end?
I can give you a real, no joke answer to that question. In 2014 when the Democrats retake the White House. And sorry folks, but no matter how bad Trump is in 2020, he's winning re-election. The Democrats will again fail to nominate someone who can win a national election in 2020 but they should get it right in 2024. There will likely be a lot of environmental damage to clean up by the time 2024 comes around.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
So we can pull all the oil, coal, and gas subsidies as well, and see which ones win out on their own merits. Oil and gas do NOT want to have to compete on an even playing field. That's why they push so hard to end the subsidies for alternatives that they have enjoyed for decades.
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If you actually do the math, look at the data [wikipedia.org], and get past the obfuscation of left wing crony capitalists, you'll find that oil, coal, and gas subsidies are small compared to alternative energy subsidies.
That's your conspiracy theories, not reality.
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Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an EIA report [eia.gov] listing the amounts and types of direct subsidies and tax incentives in 2013 specific to the energy industry, for both renewables and fossil fuels, broken down by type.
It does not include any incentives that are also available to other industries, nor does it go into any detail about past subsidies (obviously fossil fuels have been receiving these subsidies a lot longer than renewables).
Re: What's next? (Score:2)
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Subsidies for renewable energies in 2013 were $7.3 billion and for fossil fuels were $3.2 billion. But renewables are less than 10% of US energy production, meaning that renewables were subsidized twenty times as much per unit of energy than fossil fuels.
"National security" is the
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If u really wanted to help national security, you would back not just wind/solar, but Geothermal and nuclear, while dropping all subsidies on fossil fuels.
No. Absolutely not. If you really wanted to help national security, you would back development of new energy technologies, and you would eliminate all funding, tax breaks, subsidies, etc etc for existing energy technologies. That includes accounting for emissions and also for environmental impact, as well as cradle to grave cost. When a hill is strip-mined, it has to be restored to a functional ecosystem afterwards. When CO2 is released, equal quantities of CO2 must be captured. No radioactive elements (fis
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pollution is a subsidy. Payed for by everyone.
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much.
Mainly they get to keep some of the money they earn by providing goods and services to consumers, just like everyone else, which is hardly a subsidy.
Re: What's next? (Score:2)
Well we should probably also include the amount the military spends on protecting oil interests? While not a subsidy, it certainly is an expenditure by the government for an industry.
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Lung cancer is a subsidy now?
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What would the social costs have been if the coal companies had not mined coal for the last 150 years?
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I'd rather not debate the relative pros and cons of how we got to our present situation. We have enough information now to know that we can't continue this way for another 150 years. Nor, really, even another 50. We have better information, ac
Why a president should never use executive orders (Score:2, Insightful)
Or appointed federal alphabet soup agencies to craft a legacy (no I'm not talking about SCOTUS appointments). Easy come easy go. I bet the president after Trump will reverse what Trumps EPA did as well. If you want a legacy you get law passed through Congress. How's that healthcare repeal coming? Obamas legacy is in the ACA good or bad.
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except it's not an executive order.
the EPA is an independent federal agency, bound by law establishing its charter to work to improve and protect the environment in order to protect the public health. the Clean Power Plan falls under that jurisdiction.
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There is ample precedent and case law that the EPA not only has the authority to regulate CO2 emissions, it also has an obligation to do so. Here are two relatively recent decisions:
Massachusettes v EPA [wikipedia.org]: a 5-4 decision from 2007 that said that, under the wording of the Clean Air Act, CO2 emissions fall under the EPA's jurisdiction. Indeed, the ruling went so far as to say that the EPA cannot ignore CO2 pollution by failing to regulate it.
Utility Air v EPA [wikipedia.org]: a 7-2 decision
The market will go where it's already headed (Score:3, Insightful)
Free market will drive energy production towards its natural destination, which is away from fossil fuels, and even nuclear. Distributed power generation and storage is where the future (currently) lies - the tipping point has already been reached. Solar production is not skyrocketing because the CAA pushed power companies away from fossil fuels. The core reason is the global manufacturing industry has slowly, and finally, ramped up photovoltaic cell production to the point that it is extremely competitive. Battery technology (not just driven by energy demands, but primarily by mobile computing which requires very high-density, long-lasting batteries) has been increasing steadily as well. Couple the two together and you have a big part of the future of energy production.
So as with many things in politics, this move is purely... political, and really doesn't matter either way. Sort of like the Paris Agreement.
Re:The market will go where it's already headed (Score:4, Interesting)
When will you drooling idiot Ayn Rand fanboi's get it through your thick heads that there has never been a free market, a free market is a construct which cannot exist and is incapable of solving certain kinds of problems, and that even Adam Smith said such things and that government regulation was necessary to keep it in check?
Humans will lie, cheat, steal, collude, form cartels, bribe and pretty much everything else that they can think of to gain an advantage.
There is no fucking such thing as a free market. Never has been, never will be. It sure as fuck drive anything to it's "natural destination". Sorry, that's wishful thinking and a belief in magic.
The free market is a bullshit lie told to idiotic young Libertarians and other morons. Stop treating it like it's some magical beneficial thing, when it's made up of a bunch of greedy assholes screwing over everyone else ... that doesn't produce optimal results no matter what fairytale version of economics you believe in.
Corporations retain all of the power, because they pay politicians to rig the game. Trump is pandering to his rich cronies, and you think that bullshit is a free market which can achieve optimal outcomes? Then you are really too fucking stupid for your own good.
This is not about where it is headed it is WHEN (Score:2)
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It seems like there are real consequences to the current US government policy. As well as increased pollution, health damage and deaths, it's shifting money from clean generation to dirty.
There are likely to be international consequences too, especially to Paris, as other countries put requirements in place that make US companies less competitive.
You had better hope that individuals fighting the government on this are well resourced, but it's going to cause some degree of pain no matter what.
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You're too late, this is already well underway, although not exactly as you'd guessed. Power companies are all following the same playbook, where they make selling power back to the grid, or using very small amounts of power from the grid, hugely unprofitable (with shitty energy resale rates and minimum fees). Going off the grid completely is the only potentially profitable option, which has such a high barrier for entry (when maintaining typical home power) that it dissuades most.
We'll see the next stage w
Coal is dead (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember as a kid dad driving past oil fields burning off natural gas. I couldn't believe it was cheaper to burn it off that to sell it. Still can't, to be honest.
Re:Coal is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Coal is dead (Score:2)
ratio (Score:2)
Why can't Venus be an accepted CO2 example? (Score:2)
Devoid of ideas of his own (Score:5, Insightful)
A small consititutional change? (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps we need a cap on the maximum age of POTUS? This one seems to think like it's 1955.
This makes America Great again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Make America a Dump Again! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Make America a Dump Again! (Score:2)
Re: Make America a Dump Again! (Score:5, Informative)
I remember as a kid in the 60s going up to the mountains for vacation and suddenly finding a lot easier to breathe. Then coming back to the city -- visible at a distance by the chocolate brown smudge hovering above the horizon -- and having my eyes water.
When you look at an old TV show or movie and the buildings a few hundred yards away look all hazy -- that's not the lens or the film stock. It actually friggin' looked like that. Back before the Clean Air Act we used to have "smog events" in which hundreds of people died, like the New York Smog of 1966, one of three such events that occurred in just over a decade in that city.
Shit like that is why we have an EPA and a Clean Air act. It wasn't a bunch of tree-hugging hippies, it was average people reacting to the fact the country was being turned into a shit hole.
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While there certainly is CO2 in smog, that isn't what made it hard to breath. That would have been the Sulfur Dioxide and other organic compounds.
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True. But ramping up coal ... supposedly the justification for this ... would bring back sulfur pollution. In general CO2 nearly always comes with other nasties, except to a lesser degree with natural gas.
I wanted to point out two things. The first is that people take clean air for granted. People take stuff that was accomplished before they were old enough to pay attention for granted, like is just magically happens. Like the person on this very sight who told me, when GOES-13 failed, that the governm
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"good things are happening for the rest of the country!"
Facts not in evidence. Care to elaborate as to where? Even coal country doesn't really like coal. They only like it because it's largely the only employer in the area, and people need to eat and support welfare rural areas. Even they know the pollution they spew creates problems downwind.
As to the "rest" of the country, so much for bringing the country together. You burn so you can get rich, while the rest of the country chokes.
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Time will tell...
Re:When the New York Times is whining... (Score:5, Insightful)
there are only 76,000 coal industry workers in the country.
that's not just miners, but everyone in the industry: office workers, sales staff, equipment mechanics, etc.
actual miners are only 50k.
its a dying industry. destroying the environment for the sake of an industry smaller than the year round ski tourism industry is hardly sound economic policy. there is not and never was a war on coal. coal was killed by free market forces, not governmental ones.
advancing coal industry objectives is a detriment to the economy and the public health.
advancing green energy industry is both a much larger economic stimulus (employing more than 10x as many people), its also better for the public health and as a result less of a drain on future economy as fewer people will be sickened by the pollution from burning coal.
there is no reason to favor the coal industry.
not in economic terms, not in labor terms, and not in terms related to public health.
the ONLY reasons to favor the coal industry is out of some misguided left/right partisan stupidity, or being one of their paid shills.
both of which apply to Pruitt.
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If so little coal is being mined these days, then will the (apperently small) number of remaining coal power plants make that big a difference?
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once again you have confused your delusions with reality.
Re: When the New York Times is whining... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
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This is as intellectually dishonest as it gets. At the very end of the article is the clarification:
Emphasis mine.
OMG the radiation shielding does its job, who would have thought it.
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OMG the radiation shielding does its job, who would have thought it.
It does until it doesn't, and water is not really known for behaving itself. It is in fact known for being tricky.
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Yep, and then suddenly flyash stops being more radioactive.
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The NYT and other MSM outlets are obsessed with Trump's tweets. Meanwhile he's steadily undoing everything Obama did in the last 8 years and they don't even notice. It's like they lose their fucking minds over little stuff and don't notice the big stuff. He pardoned Arpaio right before Harvey hit. I had turned CNN on because they usually do a good job on Hurricane coverage. It was like they just forgot the Hurricane. It was the hate Trump fest. They are so obsessed over the petty crap and he knows it.
Re:When the New York Times is whining... (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly, my parents were wrong about comic books... we could've all learned something from the debate between scientists and politicians on the Planet Krypton.
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Scott Pruitt is an asshole. He's that amoral jackass in the movie who always realizes at the end of the movie just how fucking stupid they are, and die gruesomely as a result. Think of "the company" in the Alien movies. People like Burke. They just have no fucking clue what they're dealing with, and when reality catches up to them them get their faces eaten.
You don't fuck with mother nature.
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Re:When the New York Times is whining... (Score:5, Insightful)
If everybody takes care of their own problems and nobody takes care of everybody's problems, then everybody dies. See: Tragedy of the commons.
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Re:When the New York Times is whining... (Score:5, Interesting)
If what is being overturned is indeed an overreach, then it should be rolled back. With that being said, each state can and SHOULD do what they feel is right for their state, if that means that they continue down the path of the Obama restrictions, so be it, THAT is what they should be doing, making choices as a state, not being mandated in a way that doesn't fit within the legal boundaries of Federal jurisdiction. Aren't the states supposed to be more autonomous? Why aren't they making better choices so that a higher power doesn't have to step in and mandate?
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Yep, each State can put their power plants on the border of the downwind State and make the pollution someone elses problem.
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I didn't realise that Obama had been a Major. When was that? Anyway, as long as they don't repeal the President Obama-era emission rules we should be fine.
I suspect his work toward reducing greenhouse emissions generated a performance-driven promotion to Major Obvious.
Re:Obama executive insanity twisted the law (Score:4, Informative)
What is the alternative when you have an openly hostile legislature? Obama did what he could. He should have pushed harder and louder for a bill but ultimately that wasn't going to happen since anti-science agendas have ruled the GOP for quite some time.
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Bingo.
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
What happens if the president can't convince the country to back him on something good? Then he has to try harder to convince them.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
Re:Obama executive insanity twisted the law (Score:5, Insightful)
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
I don't think Obama broke any laws. He simply did his best to get an important and necessary job done, in the face of opposition from the reality-challenged knuckle-draggers who think that shouting bullshit loud enough and long enough turns it into truth. In this case, that meant getting creative with the legislative framework. I'm sure he would like to have put his initiative on a more solid footing; but his opposition cared more about tearing him down than about exercising actual leadership, so he had little choice.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
Ummm, that would be a follower you just described. POTUS is supposed to be a leader; you know, the person who sees what others don't yet see, and makes decisions, (even unpopular ones), based on logic, evidence, and science, for the long-term good of all concerned.
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If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
I don't think Obama broke any laws.
The many Supreme Court decisions against his executive orders say otherwise.
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The job of president is to faithfully execute the laws of the country. That is, yes, it is his job to to be a follower, to follow the direction that our representative body comes to consensus around.
Yes, Obama did run afoul of many laws, as confirmed in court over and over again. This is just the latest example of an action that was so far outside the law that it blocked by courts even before going into effect. The EPA's draft spells out exactly how Obama's Clean Power Plan broke with the Clean Air Act.
Of c
Re:Obama executive insanity twisted the law (Score:4, Informative)
President Obama was very much obeying the law, and a mandate from Congress does exist. The original authority comes from the Clean Air Act of 1963, as amended, Section 111, codified as 42 USC 7411 [cornell.edu], which covers pollutants from stationary air sources.
The regulation of carbon emissions was already reviewed and ruled on by SCOTUS in 2005.
The stay issued by SCOTUS on the Clean Power Plan had nothing what-so-ever to do with the fundamental authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The official documents simply state that the stay should be enacted until the rest of the cases wind thru the courts.
It is likely SCOTUS didn't want a possible repeat of Michigan v EPA (2015) where their ruling was so late as to be moot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/02/09/supreme-court-puts-the-brakes-on-the-epas-clean-power-plan/ [washingtonpost.com]
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AC asked "What is the alternative when you have an openly hostile legislature?", and I responded that the president ought to obey the law.
You now claim something different, namely that the openly hostile legislature was irrelevant. Make up your mind.
Re: Obama executive insanity twisted the law (Score:2)
I'm not claiming anything different at all. I'm simply pointing out that in the legislature's failure to enact new legislation specific to the issue, the President acted within the framework of the existing legislation.
He very much did obey the existing law.
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We weren't discussing whether "Obama obeyed the law" so your arguments about whether he did is irrelevant.
That's the typical strategy of people like you: when you can't win an argument, you obfuscate, confuse, and put up straw men.
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Even The Bush administration acknowledged AGW [scienceblogs.com]. Arguably, he opened the door for Obama.
Re:Obama executive insanity twisted the law (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit [wikipedia.org]
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The draft from the EPA addresses all of that. I'd encourage you to read it.
In short, even IF CO2 is a pollutant (and the statue defines terminology in ways that make that questionable), the law specifies the ways in which pollutants are to be regulated.
Obama's regulation acted outside of the ways the law provides for regulation of pollution.
The Clean Power Plan, when compared against the law on the books, was clearly illegal from the beginning.
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There were no requirements build into the Paris Agreement, which is partly why it was such a bad deal.
Had there been requirements, Obama would have had to get the rest of the country involved to agree to the requirements. He didn't want to bother speaking for the entire United States, or even the entire US government, so they left out any requirement.
The Paris Agreement was largely a request that countries around the world make up goals for themselves and then write the goals down.
So yeah, the whole thing w
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Do Americans really deserve this? More voted for Hillary than for Trump. The Commanderp in Tweet only won because their idiotic electoral college system gave him enough advantage to win by a hair.
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And that's why I'm saying the electoral college is idiotic. Each person's vote should be worth the same, not more if they have many square feet of unoccupied land around them. That is a worse situation than "the most populous areas controlling the whole country" IMO.
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He can only repeal what wasn't put in effect by Congress. To that effect, the Obama administration did a rather poor job at governing, simply laying the groundwork for a Clinton presidency where the same 'ruling by executive order' would be common place.
The US works (or doesn't) based on more than just the President, it was time all parties got that through their little skulls. Elect your congress critters to make laws that make sense for you and if they don't, vote them out. Congress has been "lame duck" s
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To be clear, a president can't put in place something that wasn't authorized by Congress.
Every executive order has to gain its legitimacy through authority granted to the president by law, normally mandated by law. With some exceptions, the executive branch gets its orders from Congress, so the president can only do what he was told to do, and he must do those things.
For this reason courts look super skeptically on changes of regulation. If one administration is undoing what the past administration did, som
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If you want to drive electric cars, you'll need electricity. Consider every time you charge your Tesla, 32-33% of that charge comes from coal, in the US. Can't have it both ways. Morons.
Well if you want to be precise, how about 30.4 % from coal. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... [eia.gov], at least for 2016. Expect it to be a little lower in 2017.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If you want to drive electric cars, you'll need electricity.
We could power them with the methane emissions coming from your face, the only question then is generator or fuel cell?
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully, nukes and Geothermal will get subsidies. We need clean baseload power.
Nuclear and Geothermal already do get subsidies. That's literally the only way they can exist! Nobody will insure a nuclear plant, so the government has to do it. Decommissioning always costs more than "expected", and the taxpayer always has to pay for at least most of that. The waste is never correctly managed, and future generations will have to pay for that.
I live almost in the shadow of the US' largest geothermal plant at The Geysers, which is located in what may the most volcanic region in the world. I