There is thoughtful skepticism and then there is today’s Republican Study Committee release mocking the EPA’s finding that greenhouse emissions threaten human health. Reading this peacock of a press release, you would think that battling measures meant to combat climate change was the only way to create jobs? Wait, is it?
EPA Announces Exhaling Endangers Human Health
Job-Killing National Energy Tax Just What the Doctor OrderedWashington, Dec 7 – Earlier today, the EPA announced that carbon dioxide is a danger to human health. This is good news for all those opposed to the despicable practice of breathing, but it may put the rest of humankind in an odd spot. After all, isn’t the carbon dioxide emitted by flying Air Force One to Copenhagen identical to the carbon dioxide exhaled while addressing a Joint Session of Congress? If one is a danger to human health, isn’t the other?
Every day, over 6 billion humans and an untold number of puppies, kittens, and other animals produce large quantities of this ubiquitous gas. Should they be required to stop breathing? And every day, trees, flowers, shrubs, and other flora use carbon dioxide to sustain their own existence. Liberals are supposedly more plant-friendly than the rest of us, so why would they try to limit a gas that is essential for plant life? If the rainforests could speak, would they be stunned by this betrayal?
While you ponder all these questions, let’s discuss something else that endangers human health: the inability to find a job.
Oh snap! As Mike Lillis at the Washington Independent puts it: “It’s no mystery that Washington is a town most undedicated to nuance, but the willful failure to distinguish between a tailpipe spewing pollutants and a kitten exhaling is extreme even by the standards of this town.”
Meantime in Colorado, where recent Republican approaches to subtlety include Colorado Springs Rep. Kent Lambert predicting Virginia Tech-style massacres as a result of a CSU campus ban on concealed weapons, gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis can hold forth on TV (watch clip 2 of 12) as though the only energy jobs in the state are jobs in the oil and gas industry, as if it were 1965.
“The governor, the current administration, came up with the toughest oil and gas rules in the country. So now… we’re clear at the bottom as a state to do business in as far as it’s related to the energy industry… There’s nothing wrong with business. Let’s go back to the free market,” he told 9 News’s Adam Schrager.
The performance raises a question to ponder: If the growing solar panel and wind turbine shops and clean energy R&D centers and smart grid technologies and mass commercial and residential buildings being retrofitted could all speak, would they be stunned by this betrayal?
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