As if this agency comprised entirely of unelected pointy-headed collectivists hasn't done enough damage since its 1971 inception, it just issued a new proposal:
The technology-based standards EPA is proposing include:
- Strengthening the current New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for newly built fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)
- Establishing emission guidelines for states to follow in limiting carbon pollution from existing fossil fuel-fired steam generating EGUs (including coal, oil and natural gas-fired units)
- Establishing emission guidelines for large, frequently used existing fossil fuel-fired stationary combustion turbines (generally natural gas-fired)
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who may be the last Democrat alive with his head on straight, is not on board:
“This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” Manchin said in a statement. “I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach.”
This development comes about as this administration is attacking human advancement from this angle as well:
There’s no serious dispute that one of the most significant obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the lack of suitable charging infrastructure to back them up, something of particular importance given the anxiety that many consumers feel about the range an EV can go without a charge and, for that matter, the amount of time that it takes to charge an EV.
Henry Grabar looks at this issue in the Atlantic:
Recently, I was chatting with a friend who drives an electric vehicle in New York City—and parks it at the curb. There are no curbside chargers in his neighborhood, so powering up requires dipping into a nearby garage for a few hours, or driving to a curb in a different neighborhood entirely. Full battery? Move that car or keep paying the charging company. Studying the charging landscape to save time, money, and energy has become “his whole personality,” he told me. As he sent me image after image of prices, charging maps, and street-parking setups, I could see he wasn’t totally kidding.
The reality, of course, is that (in the end) quite a few of the central planners “managing” the transition to EVs do not believe that cars of any type belong in cities, at least in large numbers. Urban residents, they believe, should be happy with public transport and their supposedly delightful “15-minute cities” (a topic for another time). For such planners, the difficulty faced in finding a charger is a feature not a bug, if not one they can admit to. Yet. Frogs in a pot and all that.
Factors such as cost and convenience are the most immediately effective way to present the argument that all this is wrong to the American public.
But I would posit that they are secondary to the central issue: freedom.
Look, I get that there were growing pains attendant to the industrial revolution, from the pollution so prevalent in its early days to the historically unprecedented phenomenon of summoning men (at first; later, women, too) out of their homes in which work and family life had previously seamlessly blended and into aesthetically stultifying behemoth buildings to perform tasks of mind-numbing repetition. But human ingenuity set about addressing these matters. The fields of manufacturing and resource extraction are quite clean today, and the fact that they continuously employ technological advancements has made the work much more engaging.
And, of course, the central question continues to loom: Would you rather forego heart transplants, emergency-rescue helicopters, smart phones and air conditioning?
The collectivists would respond that in our bright future, we'll have all these things; they'll just be powered by clean energy. We'll make private-sector makers of these things cover as much of the costs as they can, and we'll subsidize the rest.
But isn't that for each consumer, and, for the matter, producer, to decide? If I want a petroleum-powered car the next time I go shopping for a vehicle, shouldn't I have access to the full panoply of options that makers might want to offer me?
Damn it, let's review a fundamental and morally irrefutable law of economics:
A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity, most certainly not government, has any business being part of that agreement.
Always been true, always gonna be true.
Don' stand for what the EPA is trying to cram down your throat.
No comments:
Post a Comment