I don’t know about you but it’s really expensive to fly these days. You really only have the choice to fly Delta and pay a fortune or fly a “budget” airline where you end up paying out the nose for everything. The fact that we’re going to have even more regulations via the EPA will make it even more expensive to travel…ugh!
The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to impose tougher emissions standards on commercial airplanes in the United States, a move that experts say will lead to carbon taxes on airline passengers in the near future but one that could ultimately trigger the de-industrializing of America.
The order will not impact smaller planes or military aircraft.
The New York Times reports the directive is part of the Obama administration’s larger climate change agenda, but this step may have been unavoidable.
“The agency didn’t really have a choice here. This was going to be a non-discretionary decision,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Will Yeatman.
According to Yeatman, the die was cast on this policy and much more when the Obama administration made a fateful choice to pursue its climate-change agenda through the Clean Air Act, a strategy rejected years earlier by the George W. Bush administration.
“The Clean Air Act is an interlocking mechanism, such that regulation begets further regulation. The upshot is when this administration made the choice to use the Clean Air Act as its vehicle to mitigate climate change, it, in essence, locked itself in on this course,” said Yeatman, who added that lawmakers on all sides of the climate-change debate believe the Clean Air Act was a terrible tool to implement an environmental agenda.
“There is agreement among them that the Clean Air Act is simply an inappropriate vehicle for this particular policy,” Yeatman said. “Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, when people were scared of global cooling. The act is meant to deal with pollutants like ozone and sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. It is meant in no way to deal with a pollutant as ubiquitous as carbon dioxide.”
However, Yeatman said there are far more serious concerns about this policy than how tougher emissions standards might impact airlines and their passengers. He said the future of the American economy is at stake.
“It doesn’t stop here. The dominoes will keep on falling and the logical end, which is pretty scary, is something known as a greenhouse gas National Ambient Air Quality Standard,” he explained. “That would effectively necessitate the de-industrialization of the United States of America’s economy. That’s the sort of frightening end game. It’s where we’re headed due to this administration’s foolish choice to get this ball rolling.”
Read more:wnd
