You are in violation of the EPA

I think you forgot to put the sarc font on that whole statement.

Hmmm - they want trees everywhere but trees would die without CO2!

Yes that's a nice spin but did you actually read anything other than `regulate carbon dioxide'???

``Under a Supreme Court ruling, the so-called endangerment finding is needed before the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released from power plants, factories and automobiles under the federal Clean Air Act. ''

So, limiting carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released from power plants, factories and automobiles is a bad thing?

I know Obama is trying to kill grandma, but I don't think he's telling you to stop breathing. I may be wrong, though.

Waiting for the feds to fix it....... don't hold your breath

Are you of the opinion that inhaling CO2 - a waste product - is good for your health and welfare?

To more accurately frame the EPA's position:

The scientific issue is that increasing concentrations of CO2 leads to toxicity in the waters and air. The scientists aren't as moronic silly as your post would have us believe.

With Cap & Tax as well at this business is going to be impacted - and the economy is moving along so well.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126013960013179181.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

I think you are totally missing the point- or deliberately trying to mislead.  The issue is not to elimate all CO2.  It's to figure out how much can be present and maintain an atmosphere that is conducive to human life. 

We all breath oxygen.  We need it to survive.  In certain conditions, higher concentrations are desirable.  But breathing pure O2 is deadly.  When SCUBA diving, you get oxygen toxicity, seize, and die.  For many years we used high doses of oxygen for premature babies whose lungs were not developed - it caused blindness in thousands.  And if you breathe pure O2, it will depress the respiratory drive, and you will die. 

The point is that regulations are meant to identify acceptable levels of things.  Like mouse hairs and insect parts in food.

What you call a waste product is, for most of the ecosystem, a vital part of life. 

Also the EPA is trying to say that increased CO2 leads to global warming which has an adverse effect on the envronment not that is in and of itself is toxic to the environment.

Renee,

So is too much water, vitamins and other normal products can be toxic at high levels. So can C02, but it is used every second by us and most everything around us.

Yes Tony, I was just adding a little drama. I understand it's coming from power plants

Legally under the Clean Air Act EPA is not allowed to consider any economic factors (good or bad), only science when considering these things.  EPA here is just doing what they are legally bound to do - in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 and a few other greenhouses gasses are pollutants and are subject to the Clean Air Act.  Once that had been decided EPA legally has to decide whether these pollutants endanger human health and welfare - welfare being the key word in this case.  And they are going to decide that yes, the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere (namely warming the climate) endanger human welfare.  Although it's much more fun just to be sarcastic about the whole thing and react to the headline.

That said, I see this more as a prod to get congress to do something.  Yes, EPA legally had to make a ruling, but if EPA were to regulate these emissions there would be some pretty dramatic economic consequences so it is basically a prod for congress to do something instead (such as cap & trade) that conceivably the industries affected would be able to have a say in and lobby the lawmakers about. 

Common sense appears to be dead...

That's right - most things in excess can become toxic. That's exactly the issue.

It's the concern for growing concentrations of CO2 (to toxic levels) and, by extension, how much of that toxicity is attributable to industrial output (i.e. man-made) that is the problem. But I suspect you know that, as does everybody else. 

We can all regulate how much water we intake, as well as vitamins and food. We cannot, however,  regulate how much CO2 we breathe (unless we all walk around with a control device such as a gas mask). Another rather obvious counterpoint. Since we can't regulate how much CO2 6 billion people intake, scientists and policy makers are looking at ways to regulate how much CO2 is being generated by non-natural events. Makes perfect sense to me that they would look at the problem before we reach the tipping point.

No idea why the science merits ridicule.

 

For CO2 to be toxic to humans it has to get up to concentrations that it would never approach in the atmosphere.  You need an enclosed place with poor ventilation before you start seeing any toxic effects on humans.  Like Trinnas said, it is being regulated here because it is a pollutant and because of the effects it could have on our environment and thus our welfare, not any direct health issues.

This is the announcement that we shall all remember as the moment Al Gore became a BILLIONAIRE...

It's a good thing those pesky dinosaurs and their polluting cars all died off...

I'm confused.  Are you saying that because CO2 was high millions of years ago that it's impossible that the incease in CO2 today can be due to humans? 

Or that dinosaur cars are responsible for todays warming?  There have been studies that show that dinosaurs cars did not emit any CO2 since they were powered by feet going thru the bottom of the car.

LOL, well played...!...Actually the driver had to exert more so they CO2 would have been greater

No I'm not saying it's impossible...but I'm not as bold (or foolish) as the EPA and UN to say that it's 100% unequivocally BECAUSE of humans...

I'm saying that CO2 levels were MUCH higher in the past and life evolved pretty well on Earth despite this.  It's asinine for government to start declaring that CO2 is a "health hazard" when it's obvious they have a political and monetary agenda.

Edited by TriRSquared 2009-12-07 1:18 PM

heh, that would be an interesting study to find out Fred Flintstones carbon footprint.  All those brontosuarus burger bbqs...

Just a couple of things - EPA and the UN have never claimed it's 100% equivically because of humans.  There is no way any kind of attribution of 100% causality could be proven and I think the doomsayers who try to perpetuate that do the whole scientific community a disservice.  But to borrow from this article, it's not a binary equation,  it's not either 0% confidence it's human caused or 100%.  There are varying degrees of confidence of amount and attribution.  And right now we can say with a high confidence that the warming we're seeing is human caused.  High enough to all but rule out that we're causing at least a portion of the warming.  But I think you have to make sure to detach that from the other areas of what are the future conditions and what are the consequences for those conditions.  For those areas the confidence is quite a bit lower.

I'll also note that EPA didn't make this determination because they found it to be a health hazard, they made it because they found it to be a hazard to general human welfare.  Yes, life evolved just fine thru the millions of years when CO2 was high, but it also wasn't the climate that we have right now either.  Tropical conditions existed in the arctic - dinosaur bones have been found on Alaska's north shore, palm fossils have been found near Hudson Bay.  Sea levels were 300ft higher than they are now...  Yes CO2 levels were higher than now back during the dinos, but do we really want the climate that went along with it?  What kind of economic, geopolitical and human health consequences are there if it gets warm enough for palm trees to thrive in northern Canada again?  That may be the extreme case at the high estimates of warming, but its something we have to consider.  Would we be able to support the worlds current poulation under that regime?  Maybe we do want that climate, maybe the changes won't be all that bad, but it seems like a danegrous experiment we're undertaking.  I'll take my brontosaurus burger medium rare...

The planet will be fine.  And life, in some form, will undoubtedly continue, until the sun burns out. But can HUMAN life be sustained?  That's what most of us really care about.  Screw the cockroaches! I want to keep the planet suitable for me!

But when you based policy on unknowns like this is DOES become a binary equation.  You either tax carbon or you do not.  You either fine companies that produce CO2 or you do not.

Look in a perfect world I agree.  Stop using fossil fuels.  Stop producing pollutants.  Start hugging tress.  I'm really a conservationist at heart.  However I'm also a US (manufacturing) business owner.  Placing demands on companies in the US and not placing those same demands on companies OUTSIDE the US is a surefire way to destroy US manufacturing (and hence the US economy).

But just because there are unknowns doesn't mean we know 0%.  To borrow again from the article because he says it better than me:

"Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. The (scientific) community spends most of its time trying to add a brick here or a brick there and slowly adding to the construction. The idea that the ’science is settled’ is equivalent to stating that the building is complete and that nothing further can be added. Obviously that is false – new bricks (and windows and decoration and interior designs) are being added and argued about all the time. However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut."

But just because we know we're causing it is totally seperate from whether we need to tax carbon, do a cap & trade system, do nothing, etc.  Those are all political questions.  the science to guide those policy decisions I agree is of a lower confidence.  Where we may be painting the walls on the building of human attribution, we're still framing the building of future conditions amd risks.  You may be absolutely right that any cap & trade system would be more expensive than the consequences of just continuing to add CO2 at our current rate.  The science at the moment says it won't, but the confidences are lower and the uncertainties are higher and maybe we haven't met the bar yet for action.  But if you're saying we don't know we're causing the climate to change because we can't be certain what the effects will be is to look at the wrong set of uncertainties - all uncertainties aren't created equal.

Science by definition:
Science is a continuing effort to discover and increase human knowledge and understanding through disciplined research. Using controlled methods, scientists collect observable evidence of natural or social phenomena, record measurable data relating to the observations, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work. The methods of scientific research include the generation of hypotheses about how phenomena work, and experimentation that tests these hypotheses under controlled conditions. Scientists are also expected to publish their information so other scientists can do similar experiments to double-check their conclusions. The results of this process enable better understanding of past events, and better ability to predict future events of the same kind as those that have been tested.

Since all those scientists that do not believe in "Global Warning" and that we are close to "Tipping" are not listened to and just called quacks are we not redefining science to be what ever the people will react to emotionally and run with it. Not saying that all, but the most notable and most used science in this vain has been at least tainted and yet we still go with "The sky is falling" and lets change now (even though we don't really know why we are changing).

Now if you are for or against "Global Warming" at least be honest with what research you have studied and did you look at both sides BEFORE making a decision.