THE EPA AS DUST POLICE

You can't make this stuff up!

According to Reuters, EPA wants farmers to rein in the amount of dust floating in the air in the American countryside.

The EPA plans to issue the regulations in the fall of 2011. Details of those regulations and the method of enforcement remain unknown.

Read the rest here at Always On Watch.

THE BIRTH-CERTIFICATE DISTRACTION

Please see THIS (with thanks to Will). Brief excerpt:

While we were distracted by the president's birth certificate show-and-tell, his EPA releases its guidelines for expanding federal power under the Clean Water Act....

[...]

President Obama said the whole "birther" controversy was a distraction from other more important things. That's just the way he wanted it.

Read it all.

The Obama administration is certainly adept at one thing — using sleight of hand.

THE 1970 EARTH DAY PREDICTIONS

From I Hate the Media and contains some real gems of lunacy:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
leisure-suits

Leisure suits are gone, but the Earth is still here

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
chevy-vega

Sadly, vegans have outlived the Vega.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

I attended college from 1968-1972 and was subjected to all the above propaganda. To my everlasting credit, I didn't buy into all the hyperventilating nonsense.

THE EPA CLASSIFIES MILK AS OIL

Absolute madness! You can't make up these surreal developments.

From this essay by Thomas Sowell:

...We all understand why the EPA was given the power to issue regulations to guard against oil spills, such as that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the more recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But not everyone understands that any power given to any bureaucracy for any purpose can be stretched far beyond that purpose.

In a classic example of this process, the EPA has decided that, since milk contains oil, it has the authority to force farmers to comply with new regulations to file "emergency management" plans to show how they will cope with spilled milk, how farmers will train "first responders" and build "containment facilities" if there is a flood of spilled milk.

Since there is no free lunch, all of this is going to cost the farmers both money and time that could be going into farming-- and is likely to end up costing consumers higher prices for farm products.

It is going to cost the taxpayers money as well, since the EPA is going to have to hire people to inspect farms, inspect farmers' reports and prosecute farmers who don't jump through all the right hoops in the right order. All of this will be "creating jobs," even if the tax money removed from the private sector correspondingly reduces the jobs that can be created there.

Does anyone seriously believe that any farmer is going to spill enough milk to compare with the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the BP oil spill?

Do you envision people fleeing their homes, as a flood of milk comes pouring down the mountainside, threatening to wipe out the village below?

It doesn't matter. Once the words are in the law, it makes no difference what the realities are. The bureaucracy has every incentive to stretch the meaning of those words, in order to expand its empire....

EXECUTIVE ORDER POWER GRAB

In the name of environmentalism, Obama yesterday exerted federal control over America's Gulf of Mexico Region (from examiner.com Los Angeles):

...The Federal Government sat on the sidelines for more than five months as Gulf residents lost jobs, homes and self-respect as more and more became sick each day from the deadly toxin, Corexit. The toxin was illegally sprayed on residents, marshlands and habitats. The Administration didn’t act to save the residents, but now the administration is concerned over the ecosystems.

[Yesterday's] Executive Order was similar to Executive Order 13366 issued on July 19 to sieze the Great Lakes for a similar purpose, to... ‘restore biological diversity…improve health of oceans, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems and to support sustainable access to land.” The Great Lakes is overseen by the appointed Great Lakes Czar Cameron Davis, a former Chicago environmentalist.

Protection of residents in both Executive Orders seems to be lacking. Both are considered to be serious violations of property rights.

The Federal Government currently owns more than 30% of United States land and seems to be planning to take more....

The executive order is HERE.