a knock at the back door
SO THE ELDEST OFFSPRING IS APPLYING TO GRAD SCHOOL.
And despite having watched one of her parents labor in the profession for her entire lifetime, she is considering going for a master’s degree in (gulp) journalism. As part of the admissions process
for one school, she was asked to list her picks for the Top 10 news
stories of 2009.
This journalistic exercise, commonly conducted in newsrooms
around the world at the beginning of every year, made for some
interesting dinner conversation last week. For 2009, her choices
more or less mirrored the entries on most of the lists published in
the first half of January: the inauguration of Barack Obama, the
economy’s collapse, the health care reform debate, the death of
Nobel Peace Prize, the attempted Christmas
Day bombing of a U.S.-bound airplane, the
Fort Hood massacre, the death of
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, and the
“Miracle on the Hudson” plane crash.
Based on the view from here, though, there
was one important story missing from these
lists. Perhaps that was because it was a bit subtle. Its ramifications, though, are decidedly
unsubtle. This development has implications
for virtually every business in America, including (or maybe especially) those involved in
transportation and logistics.
The news broke on Dec. 7—appropriately,
Pearl Harbor day, a date which will live in infamy. On that Monday
(which also happened to mark the start of the Copenhagen climate
change summit), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
announced it would begin developing regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Given that almost 90 percent of U.S.
economic activity currently relies on the use of fossil fuels, the
EPA’s proposed actions could eventually affect virtually every U.S.
business and every U.S. citizen.
In its announcement, the EPA declared carbon dioxide to be an
air pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act. In so doing, it granted itself the authority to embark on a sweeping regulatory undertaking and expansion of its own powers—whether Congress is
willing to go along with it or not. Some call it “regulation without
representation.” A more appropriate term would be backdoor regulation, because that is simply what it is.
From a purely political standpoint, the timing of the EPA’s
announcement makes sense. Just weeks earlier,
the news broke that scientists researching glob-
al warming had withheld evidence that contra-
dicted their own theories about climate change.
Once the news leaked out, the current U.S.
administration no doubt saw the handwriting
on the wall for both the Copenhagen talks and
for its own carbon-reduction initiative, the plan
popularly known as cap and trade.
