Perhaps the most effective tool in the overlords' kit

The focus right now is on Freedom-Hater-care and the Department of Health and Human Services, but the EPA may be imposing statism even more effectively.

In any case, it serves as a perfect example of how freshly-created federal bureaucracies never stay within their originally intended scope:

Richard Stewart, a founding trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund, noted in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law in 1988 that the “EPA’s regulation has grown to the point where it amounts to nothing less than a massive effort at Soviet-style planning of the economy.” 

That was eighteen years after it was established.  How do we fare forty-three years later?  The carbon capture and storage technology that is now going to be required of all coal-fired power plants is not feasible.

No one in the business of generating electricity believes CCS is anywhere near commercially demonstrated — no one, that is, who hasn’t just received a federal loan guarantee of half a billion dollars. Several heavily subsidized small pilot projects already have failed miserably, and the remaining projects, supported by more of those millions in loan guarantees and grants, are incomplete without evidence of viability. When a carbon-control technology must utilize 50 percent of the electricity generated by the plant, the enterprise simply is not viable.

The EPA is no longer acting within its authority to protect the environment and human health. Instead, it has arrogated to itself the right to dictate the nation’s energy infrastructure. Shirking the role prescribed by Congress when the agency was created in 1970, the EPA is taking on the more exhilarating role of central planner of the new clean-energy economy. The EPA concedes that the CO₂ rule will not reduce CO₂ emissions but claims that it is still justified because it reinforces the market’s trend toward investment in clean energy.

At the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit last month, I had the opportunity to have a short hallway conversation with Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  I asked him what he thought of the trend in the construction industry of making LEED certification a bragging point for projects.  He said that right now, given that acquiring such certification is voluntary, its value is something for the market to decide.  But, he said, does anyone think the day won't come when it is mandatory?

Indeed.  In post-America, everything eventually becomes mandatory.