Yeetle Box - Bush Bloated With Gas!

The Bush administration on Friday rejected regulating greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, saying it would cause too many job losses. The Bush administration estimates that regulating greenhouse gases could result in job losses in the "100's!"

In a 588-page federal notice (which is more pages than most Russian novels), the Environmental Protection Agency made no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people's health, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the next president and Congress - a bold move for a lame duck administration.

EPA Administrator and long-time friend to industry, supporter of deregulation, and George W. Bush's personal ball washer, Stephen Johnson insisted that regulating greenhouse gases via the Clean Air Act was not workable.

"If our nation is truly about serious regulating greenhouse gases, the Clean Air Act is the wrong tool for the job," Johnson told reporters. "It is really at the feet of Congress. You see, the Clean Air Act is a piece of paper. At the feet of Congress we have many more assets at our disposal."

The White House on Thursday rejected EPA's conclusion three weeks earlier that the 1970 Clean Air Act "can be both workable and effective for addressing global climate change." Instead, EPA said Friday that law is "ill-suited" for dealing with climate change.

Said an unofficial former EPA official, "It's really quite simple. The law can only exist within statutes. By itself, it is an inanimate object devoid of sentience. Ergo, it cannot manage a complex problem, but can merely exist by itself in a state of eternal inanimation."

In its voluminous document, the EPA laid out a buffet of options on how to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, ships, trains, power plants, factories and refineries. However, because of the size of the document, no one has yet read it in its entirety and requests have gone out to the EPA for "green" bookmarks.

"One point is clear: The potential
regulation of greenhouse gases under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in unprecedented expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the land,"

the EPA's Johnson said in a preface to the federal notice. "This unprecedented expansion would defeat the very purpose of government as an agile, yet robust, agent of change - unlike Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Unprecedented, I say."

"Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion [Supreme Court decision] because it does not fairly recognize the enormous — and, we believe, insurmountable — burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited benefits, of using the Clean Air Act" to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. I just damned hard to do."

Friday's action caps months of often tense negotiations between EPA scientists and the White House over how to address global warming under the major federal air pollution law. The central debate has been framed as to how the United States can continue to willy nilly pollute without adversely effecting the environment - a debate sure to last well beyond any meaningful reduction of greenhouse gases and the well-being of the planet.

Representatives of industry still expressed concern over suggestions in the document that a future administration might regulate emissions.

"EPA has set forth a road map which literally throws the entire way which we manage the environment and economy in complete turmoil," said Bill Kovacs, a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"We want them [EPA] to say it is clearly the inefficient way to go," he said of mandatory emission reductions. "Just like we want them to say that pigs can fly. No difference."

The Yeetle Box