RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/12/king-joes-ev-stamp-act-wheres-the-outrage/

Where’s the outrage?” implored Bob Dole in 1996, regarding the lack of Clinton administration accountability on Chinese campaign cash, illegally obtained FBI personnel files, and rushing potentially criminal immigrants through naturalization.

Occasioning the reminiscence: the recent EPA mandate to electrify 67% of vehicles in just nine years.

Why so little fuss over King Joe’s Stamp Act: an outrageous, unjustified, immoral, and economy-wide act of taxation without representation, regulation without delegation, and downright despotism? 

After all, the 1765 enactment under George III helped ignite a revolution. Historians highlight the colonials’ belief that being compelled to employ London-produced, tax-stamped paper was not about its ostensible purpose: paying for the continent’s defense. Rather, it was to keep the Americans in their place by sustaining British patronage, privilege, and most of all, power.

Patronage via sops to surplus redcoat officers and mercenaries stationed here. Privilege in suppressing the rise of a professional class through disproportionate levies on lawyers’ and students’ supplies.

And power in undemocratically reinforcing the principle of unrepresentative royal and parliamentary supremacy over elected colonial assemblies. 

Plan an insinuation of British control throughout the economy and culture by taxing everything from legal documents to newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and even dice and playing cards – in all, more than 40 categories.

Fast forward to 2023 and the Biden regime’s corrupto-cratic diktat to consign internal combustion engines to history’s junkyard. Like the handiwork of King Joe’s across-the-seas predecessor and his Parliament, the new standards have nothing to do with “fuel economy” (their initial purpose in 1970s, oil embargo-scarred America), climate, or even cars.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epas-latest-power-grab-power-plant-proposal-clean-air-act-climate-change-emissions-ff0f1890?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The Biden administration’s new power-plant proposal, announced Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency, would hobble the natural-gas industry. In the process it would make electricity more expensive, cause more blackouts and brownouts, and force Americans to pay more for less energy.

The proposed rule would require most existing gas- and coal-fired power plants to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 90% or more over the next 10 to 15 years—up to 96% for the largest and most heavily used plants. Newly constructed gas plants, as soon as they start up, would immediately have to meet standards based on the most efficient—and most expensive—generating equipment, reaching the same 90%-or-higher reduction over time. These massive cuts assume the use of carbon capture and other, even less proven measures.

This is more than misguided policy. It’s legally dubious, and the agency knows it. But the Biden administration’s urgent goal is shifting how markets allocate capital among types of energy before a potential power shift in Washington next year, with little regard for the longer-term effect on American families and businesses.

Section 111 of the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to consider cost when determining whether a “system of emission reduction” is “adequately demonstrated.” In other words, EPA regulations can’t be too expensive, and must be grounded in technical and market realities. But Thursday’s proposal is based mainly on assumptions that plants will employ carbon capture and hydrogen co-firing—replacing the natural gas the plant was designed to run on with hydrogen gas—which impose exorbitant costs on electricity producers and haven’t yet been used at scale. These technologies are, at best, many years away from viability even with large subsidies under the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. In tacit admission of this reality, the Biden administration’s proposed rule would instead create an incentive for many existing power plants to shut down, allowing those that close by 2032 to avoid any new requirements in the interim.