Rally Caps

I get the sense that the stock market wants to rally. Today's 497 point rise in the Dow is unalloyed good news. I'd really like to see my battered portfolio start to get better and there's reason to believe that it could recover quickly. Unless the government decides to do something really stupid.

And right on cue, here's something really stupid:

The Environmental Protection Agency's new leadership, in a step toward confronting global warming, submitted a finding that will force the White House to decide whether to limit greenhouse gas emissions under the nearly 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

Under that law, EPA's conclusion -- that such emissions are pollutants that endanger the public's health and welfare -- could trigger a broad regulatory process affecting much of the U.S. economy as well as the nation's future environmental trajectory. The agency's finding, which was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget without fanfare on Friday, also reversed one of the Bush administration's landmark decisions on climate change, and it indicated anew that President Obama's appointees will push to address the issue of warming despite the potential political costs.

This is a masterpiece in understatement. To put it simply -- if the Clean Air Act is used as a rationale for challenging anything that might cause "global warming," there won't be much of anything happening. One thing has been quite clear in the years since the Clean Air Act was first passed; it is an ideal way for enviornmentalists to litigate the hell out of pretty much any project. It's well-nigh impossible to bring new power plants online these days because such projects are fought every step of the way.

It's also possible that the promised infrastrucure projects that are part of the stimulus package will be slowed or stopped outright because of such findings. Would building that new highway produce more CO2? Sure it would. Can't have it, then!

To put things in perspective, consider the testimony of another Obamanoid:

Last month, Howard Frumkin, who directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health, testified before a Senate committee that the CDC "considers climate change a serious public health concern" that could accelerate illnesses and deaths stemming from heat waves, air pollution, and food- and water-borne illnesses.

Think about how stupid this is. One of the primary reasons that water-borne illnesses are rare in the United States is that we have outstanding sewage treatment plants. Illnesses like cholera are almost nonexistent here because we are able to clean the water we consume. It was a huge story when Milwaukee had a problem with cryptosporidium a few years ago; in many parts of the world such pathogens are a given in the water supply. It's actually one of the triumphs of public works that liberals ought to celebrate. But these plants require maintenance and, in some cases, replacement. Now imagine a regulatory scheme that stops construction of such plants because they would inevitably cause a rise in greenhouse emissions. Could you have an EPA that, through its attempts to regulate CO2, would cripple our ability to undertake projects that are necessary for public health and public safety? If you have doubts, you aren't really paying attention.