The costly tyranny of the architects of planned decline

The relentless march of the executive-branch jackboots:

The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration jointly issued a new regulation last week that is meant to help protect the world from "climate change" by limiting “greenhouse gas emissions” and improving fuel efficiency in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles operated in the United States.

The 1,690-page regulation is approximately 700,000 words long.

A “regulatory impact analysis” published by EPA and NHTSA estimates the regulation will add an average of as much as $13,749 to the cost of a tractor truck and $1,370 to a trailer, making some tractor-trailer combinations $15,119 more expensive in 2027 than they would be under current regulations.

While admitting that the regulation will increase the cost of trucks and the other vehicles it effects, the administration argues that the owners of these vehicles will actually save money by using less fuel and that the regulation “will result in up to $230 billion in net benefits to society.”

These “net benefits to society” include what the administration calls “health benefits” and “energy security benefits.”

The new regulations cover a range of vehicles running from heavy-duty pickup trucks and passenger vans, through “vocational vehicles” (such as garbage trucks, emergency vehicles and school buses), to large cargo trucks such as tractor-trailers.
In a co-authored blog published on the White House website, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the regulation is part of President Obama’s “Climate Action Plan.”
“In 2013, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan, a bold plan that is now on track to reduce emissions from nearly every sector of our economy,” said McCarthy and Foxx.
“Today, we are fulfilling one of the central promises in this plan — finalizing the second phase of greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy duty vehicles for model years 2018 and beyond,” they said.
While the EPA administrator and Transportation secretary conceded that the regulation will increase the prices of the regulated vehicles, they argued that it will reduce CO2 emissions and fuel consumption and that truck owners will actually save money in the long run because they will buy less fuel.

Let's itemize some of the ways in which this edict poisons the human condition:

1. It's unconstitutional. The legislative branch is supposed to pass laws. 
2. Even if this were to come from Congress, it would still be tyrannical. It is government interfering in economic relations between buyer and seller (truck makers and owner-operators)
3. It's the arrogance of the nanny state on full display. Any owner-operator with his brain intact wants to keep his fuel costs as low as possible, but finds the imposition of the upfront cost of a more expensive rig prohibitive. It's called the free market. As with any consumer, he is balancing an array of considerations in arriving at his final purchasing decision.
4. It's based on utter fictions, namely, that the global climate is in some kind of trouble, and that there is some urgent need to skimp on the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

But it's the kind of thing that will be imposed in spades in a Hillionaire administration.