Biden EPA Has Acted Like ‘Gestapo,’ Mistreated Ohio Residents in East Palestine Cleanup, House Candidate Says
A Republican candidate for the House of Representatives ripped the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, saying it was “mistreating residents” of East Palestine, Ohio.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday he would visit the city where the Feb. 3, 2023, train derailment occurred, fulfilling a promise to visit East Palestine made in March 2023. The derailment caused people to evacuate after chemicals were spilled.
Dr. Rick Tsai, who is running for the House seat vacated when Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, resigned last month to become president of Youngstown State University, blasted the EPA and federal government during an appearance on WMAL-FM radio’s “The Vince Coglianese Show” in Washington.
“I don’t think the world knows the whole truth about what happened here and is still going on in East Palestine,” Tsai told Coglianese, who is also the Daily Caller’s editorial director.
Officials warned of a possible “catastrophic blast” at the derailment site Feb. 6, 2023, and carried out a controlled burn of chemicals, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
“The government put the entity that caused this catastrophe in control of the cleanup, and they’ve almost been like the Gestapo here, mistreating residents,” Tsai added.
Tsai has done his own testing of local creeks, saying he has found elevated levels of benzene, according to Cleveland’s WKYC-TV
“As of yesterday or the day before, Ann Vogel of the Ohio EPA was saying they have no evidence of chemicals in our land or a creek,” Tsai told Coglianese. “I can give a 7-year-old a stick and teach him how to find these chemicals. I don’t know how the EPA doesn’t do it with their millions of dollars at, you know, their beck and call.”
Former President Donald Trump visited East Palestine in February 2023, donating bottled water and pallets of supplies to assist residents in the town
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The SEC Oversteps its Powers on Climate Change
Nearly two years ago, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule that would force publicly traded companies to take climate change seriously by reporting on how climate change might materially affect their operations. The mandatory reports were to include, among other things, what actions they are taking to fight climate change, to anticipate and mitigate its potential impacts, to report on their emissions, and the emissions created throughout their supply chain, and any efforts they were taking to reduce emissions. This was a purely political action pushed by the commission’s three Democrat appointees.
Facing fierce backlash from investors, the public, and Congress, the SEC has delayed, for the moment, formally imposing the rule.
During the SEC’s delay, California, ever the leader in inane, job-destroying, consumer-costing policies, stepped in and passed its own similar law. As will be the case should the SEC finalize its rule, business and farm groups sued to block the law, in part, because it usurps the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce by applying to companies headquartered outside the state, if they do business in California. The lawsuit also argues the law violates their constitutional right to free speech by compelling to them to take a position on the much-debated topic of climate change -- the state’s position, in fact.
Back to the SEC. Created in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash in order to protect investors from fraud and market manipulation, to maintain a fair and orderly market, and to facilitate capital formation, the SEC’s climate rule falls well outside its statutory authority. The SEC assumes that climate change does or will soon materially affect the operations of most, if not all, the publicly traded companies over which it has oversight. However, evidence for this is lacking.
As detailed at Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and Climate Change Weekly, there is no evidence that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or severe; not hurricanes, floods, droughts, nor wildfires. Seas are rising, but no faster than their historic norm since the end of the last ice age. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that it can’t detect, with high confidence, trends in extreme weather resulting from ongoing climate change, nor can it attribute any such events or trends to human actions, with high confidence.
If data doesn’t show climate change is making weather worse, and the IPCC can’t find such a signal, how can any individual company be expected to determine that at some point in the future “climate change” will “materially affect” its operations.
Companies located in areas that are historically prone to wildfires or hurricanes might be expected to take actions to reduce the likelihood that their operations will be impacted or compromised by such events, but this would be true regardless of climate change, and such actions would have to be weighed against the cost that such action would have on long-term profitability.
Such actions might include hardening infrastructure, improving supply chains, or even moving their operations to states or areas in states less prone to the types of natural disasters that might reasonably be anticipated to materially affect the company’s operations. Of course, the high costs of prior climate regulations are already driving companies to flee California, a trend its new reporting law will likely exacerbate.
And there’s the rub, “reasonably” be anticipated. No one, no company, no country can know what will happen 30, 50, or 100 years from now. Simply put, if a company reported in its public documents and to the SEC that it did not expect climate change to materially affect its operations, whether because its board did not consider climate change a serious threat based on real-world data, or because it had no way of anticipating the types of weather events that might occur in the future, where, or when, it would be honest. However, it is doubtful that such honesty of a conclusion on the part of a company would satisfy the SEC’s climate mandarins.
Indeed, although the rule would do nothing to prevent climate change, because no single company or industry substantially impacts global warming, it would open regulated companies up to potential enforcement actions from the SEC and lawsuits from activists for “improper filing,” if the SEC isn’t satisfied with the filing or the anticipated impacts do not occur but other unforeseen impacts do occur that do materially affect the company’s profitability.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_sec_oversteps_its_powers_on_climate_change.html
***********************************************UK: Another Net Zero retreat? Tories ditch ‘boiler tax’
The energy secretary is planning to scrap the so-called boiler tax in a move that will be welcomed by homeowners facing the prospect of having to spend money to replace an old appliance.
Under the government’s “clean heat” strategy, targets had been drawn up to help phase out gas boilers and deliver 600,000 eco-friendly heat pump installations a year by 2028.
The target was due to come into effect in April, when boiler manufacturers would be required to match, or substitute, 4 per cent of their boiler sales with heat pumps or face a fine of £3,000 for every installation they fell short by.
Even though the target had not come into force, manufacturers were already increasing prices on their gas boilers to counter the impact of the fines, with prices set to increase by up to £120 this year.
Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, accused manufacturers of price gouging, which is when businesses heavily inflate the price of products that are in high demand.
She is preparing to scrap the 4 per cent target and fines after concluding that any government intervention was unlikely to prevent consumers from being hit with additional costs.
A government source said: “Boiler manufacturers have saddled families with indefensible price hikes — this is not right. We’re looking again at the policy, and expect manufacturers to do the right thing and remove their price hikes immediately.”
A formal decision has not been announced, Coutinho has held discussions with officials over several weeks on scrapping the “boiler tax”.
Coutinho has instructed officials in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to speak to the Competition and Markets Authority about launching an investigation into the home heating market to ensure that competition is not limited and consumers are getting a fair price.
The move is likely to infuriate environmentalists, coming only months after Rishi Sunak announced a climb down on the government’s net-zero strategy by pushing back the deadline for banning new petrol and diesel cars.
However, Coutinho believes it may be the only way to get manufacturers to drop their prices again, and that consumers should be prioritised over environmental targets. Some 23 million households were still using a gas boiler last year.
Sunak’s decision to slow down the green transition has won applause from right-wing Tories but sparked criticism from moderates, including the former minister Chris Skidmore, who quit as an MP last month.
A source pointed out that in a recent letter, the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA), an industry association representing boiler manufacturers and other gas appliance companies, had confirmed that the companies were prepared to back down if the target were dropped.
The energy secretary is also increasingly concerned that opposition to the boiler tax could undermine confidence in heat pump technology and lead to fewer consumers buying them.
Claire Coutinho has accused manufacturers of unreasonable price rises and is said to believe that consumers should be prioritised over environmental targets
Green policies have also plagued Germany’s government. Olaf Scholz’s coalition government tried to in effect ban all new gas and oil boiler installations as part of its drive to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, but the political and public opposition resulted in the plans being dramatically altered.
The UK government has been chastened by Germany’s experience, with sources revealing that Sunak had already contemplated scrapping the boiler tax back in September, when he announced his big climbdown on net zero.
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Europe’s Greens are on the ropes
The parties that roared to their best-ever results in 2019’s EU election on the back of mass climate protests led by Greta Thunberg are now facing a farmer-fueled backlash that is endangering their prized Green Deal.
Europe is rocking with farmers demanding exemptions from environmental rules. Nationalist parties are fanning the flames. And far-right parties in places like Germany and France are surging.
The Greens now face a stark choice as they strategize for their next big electoral test in the June EU election: compromise to save the best of the Green Deal or stick to their ideals and risk their calls for a greener agenda being sidelined.
"I'm ready to compromise — but then knowing that you need to compromise to get something," said Bas Eickhout, a Dutch European Parliament member expected to be chosen as a co-leader of the Greens’ EU election campaign during a party congress in Lyon this weekend.
The prospects of pulling off another green wave look slim, if not impossible.
In the upcoming EU election, the Greens — who vaulted to become the Parliament’s fourth-largest group in the 2019 election — are poised to lose about a third of their 72 seats, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Some of their most experienced legislators who shaped the faction’s European policies in recent years are also departing.
It gets worse.
EU environment chief Virginijus Sinkevičius — the only commissioner nominated by a green party — will not have a second stint in the role. Meanwhile, his erstwhile boss — and long-term EU climate czar — Frans Timmermans has long since returned to Dutch politics. Talks to coax Italy’s 5Star Movement to join — which could add to the Greens’ numerical strength in the next Parliament — have also hit a dead end.
The ramifications are potentially damning: The Greens could be pushed to the sidelines of climate policy decision-making in the next Parliament, have little sway over Europe’s legislative agenda in the next European Commission and be forced to watch as a more right-leaning EU assembly slows down or even repeals large parts of the Green Deal.
"The risk is real," said `Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, who is a co-leader of the Greens’ faction in the Parliament.
“Everyone is green as long as it’s free of charge. Once it starts costing someone a penny then they all scatter,” he lamented.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-greens-are-on-the-ropes-eu-elections/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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