2014 ndi 6ws-fitzmier, Lundberg, Abelkop Economy Disads Spending da

Warming causes extinction and outweighs all of their impacts

2NC Offshore Wind

Regulations kill offshore wind investment

In the famous poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Revere instructs his fellow patriots to use lanterns to signal whether there’s an attack coming by land or sea. While we may no longer have to fear the British, Americans should be warned of a new threat coming by sea in the form of President Obama’s National Ocean Policy and ocean zoning initiative. President Obama is using the ocean as his latest regulatory weapon to impose new bureaucratic restrictions on nearly every sector of our economy. While marketed as a common sense plan for the development and protection of our oceans, it is instead being used to create a massive new bureaucracy that would harm our economy. Established through Executive Order, Mr. Obama with a simple stroke of a pen took unilateral action to impose a massive top-down federal bureaucracy with broad regulatory control over our oceans, Great Lakes, rivers, tributaries and watersheds. The Executive Order creates a tangled web of regulatory layers that includes: 10 National Policies; a 27-member National Ocean Council; an 18-member Governance Coordinating Committee; and 9 Regional Planning Bodies. This has led to an additional: 9 National Priority Objectives; 9 Strategic Action Plans; 7 National Goals for Coastal Marine Spatial Planning; and 12 Guiding Principles for Coastal Marine Spatial Planning. Imposing mandatory ocean zoning could place huge portions of our oceans and coasts off-limits, seriously curtailing recreational activities, commercial fishing, and all types of energy development – including renewable energy such as offshore wind farms. What’s even more alarming is that the impact of this Executive Order is not limited to just our oceans. It establishes regional planning bodies with the authority to regulate as far inland as necessary. All rivers eventually drain into the ocean, which gives this policy the justification it needs to reach far inland. For example, the Gulf of Mexico Regional Planning Body will make decisions to regulate activities throughout the entire Mississippi River watershed if those activities have the potential to affect the Gulf of Mexico. This means a policy billed as protecting our oceans will have the ability to regulate inland activities that occur as far north as Minnesota. If farmers and ranchers thought having the EPA in their backyard was bad, wait until the National Ocean Council comes sailing upstream for a visit too. The American Farm Bureau Federation has raised serious concerns, stating that “it could extend to the regulation of every farm and ranch in the United States.”

Offshore wind solves warming – reduces emissions

Musial 10 (Walter, Works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Bonnie Ram, Energetics Writer, September 2010, “Large-Scale Offshore Wind Power in the United States; ASSESSMENT OF OPPORTUNITIES AND BARRIERS,” http://usoffshorewind.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/NREL-large-offshore-wind-us.pdf)

Increasing the percentage of renewable energy generation in our nation’s fuel mix has the potential to significantly reduce harmful emissions. Although offshore wind projects have high capital costs, they have no fuel costs and low operating costs. These characteristics allow the turbines to produce energy at a much lower marginal cost than fossil-fuel power plants. As a result, offshore wind turbines displace power that otherwise would have been generated by the fossil-fuel plants and avoid any emissions that would have resulted from the combustion of the fuel. The specific type of displaced generation will vary by region and is dependent on the mix of generation in the area (Jacobson and High 2008).

Warming causes extinction and outweighs all of their impacts

Diebel 7 (Terry L., Professor of IR @ National War College, 2007 “Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic for American Statecraft”)

Finally, there is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature, which, though far in the future, demands urgent action. It is the threat of global warming to the stability of the climate upon which all earthly life depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of this threat for three decades now, and what was once a mere possibility has passed through probability to near certainty. Indeed not one of more than 900 articles on climate change published in refereed scientific journals from 1993 to 2003 doubted that anthropogenic warming is occurring. “In legitimate scientific circles,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert, “it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.” Evidence from a vast international scientific monitoring effort accumulates almost weekly, as this sample of newspaper reports shows: an international panel predicts “brutal droughts, floods and violent storms across the planet over the next century”; climate change could “literally alter ocean currents, wipe away huge portions of Alpine Snowcaps and aid the spread of cholera and malaria”; “glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster than expected, and…worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than a decade ago”; “rising sea temperatures have been accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes”; “NASA scientists have concluded from direct temperature measurements that 2005 was the hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second”; “Earth’s warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year” as disease spreads; “widespread bleaching from Texas to Trinidad…killed broad swaths of corals” due to a 2-degree rise in sea temperatures. “The world is slowly disintegrating,” concluded Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle. “They call it climate change…but we just call it breaking up.” From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the beginning of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per million (ppm). At present they are accelerating toward 400 ppm, and by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, atmospheric CO2 lasts about a century, so there is no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their increase, we are thus in for significant global warming; the only debate is how much and how serious the effects will be. As the newspaper stories quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of 1-2 degree warming in more violent storms, spread of disease, mass die offs of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened inundation of low-lying countries like the Pacific nation of Kiribati and the Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could disintegrate, leading to a sea level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolina’s outer banks, swamp the southern third of Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village. Another catastrophic effect would be the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps the winter weather in Europe far warmer than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage to the United States alone from moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent of GDP. But the most frightening scenario is runaway greenhouse warming, based on positive feedback from the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere that is both caused by and causes hotter surface temperatures. Past ice age transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global temperatures, took place in just decades, even though no one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Faced with this specter, the best one can conclude is that “humankind’s continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is akin to playing Russian roulette with the earth’s climate and humanity’s life support system. At worst, says physics professor Marty Hoffert of New York University, “we’re just going to burn everything up; we’re going to heat the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous when there were crocodiles at the poles, and then everything will collapse.” During the Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a theory of nuclear winter to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied States and the Soviet Union would not only destroy both countries but possibly end life on this planet. Global warming is the post-Cold War era’s equivalent of nuclear winter at least as serious and considerably better supported scientifically. Over the long run it puts dangers from terrorism and traditional military challenges to shame. It is a threat not only to the security and prosperity to the United States, but potentially to the continued existence of life on this planet.

2NC Agriculture

Regulations kill the agricultural industry

Hastings 12 (Doc, Chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, 6-19-12 “Obama's national ocean policy threatens jobs and economic activities onshore and off,” http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/06/19/obama-national-ocean-policy-threatens-jobs-and-economic-activites-onshore-and/)

In the famous poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Revere instructs his fellow patriots to use lanterns to signal whether there’s an attack coming by land or sea. While we may no longer have to fear the British, Americans should be warned of a new threat coming by sea in the form of President Obama’s National Ocean Policy and ocean zoning initiative. President Obama is using the ocean as his latest regulatory weapon to impose new bureaucratic restrictions on nearly every sector of our economy. While marketed as a common sense plan for the development and protection of our oceans, it is instead being used to create a massive new bureaucracy that would harm our economy. Established through Executive Order, Mr. Obama with a simple stroke of a pen took unilateral action to impose a massive top-down federal bureaucracy with broad regulatory control over our oceans, Great Lakes, rivers, tributaries and watersheds. The Executive Order creates a tangled web of regulatory layers that includes: 10 National Policies; a 27-member National Ocean Council; an 18-member Governance Coordinating Committee; and 9 Regional Planning Bodies. This has led to an additional: 9 National Priority Objectives; 9 Strategic Action Plans; 7 National Goals for Coastal Marine Spatial Planning; and 12 Guiding Principles for Coastal Marine Spatial Planning. Imposing mandatory ocean zoning could place huge portions of our oceans and coasts off-limits, seriously curtailing recreational activities, commercial fishing, and all types of energy development – including renewable energy such as offshore wind farms. What’s even more alarming is that the impact of this Executive Order is not limited to just our oceans. It establishes regional planning bodies with the authority to regulate as far inland as necessary. All rivers eventually drain into the ocean, which gives this policy the justification it needs to reach far inland. For example, the Gulf of Mexico Regional Planning Body will make decisions to regulate activities throughout the entire Mississippi River watershed if those activities have the potential to affect the Gulf of Mexico. This means a policy billed as protecting our oceans will have the ability to regulate inland activities that occur as far north as Minnesota. If farmers and ranchers thought having the EPA in their backyard was bad, wait until the National Ocean Council comes sailing upstream for a visit too. The American Farm Bureau Federation has raised serious concerns, stating that “it could extend to the regulation of every farm and ranch in the United States.”

US ag is key to global food production

Matz 9 (Marshall, Former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, is the founding chairman of Friends of the World Food Program. September 26th 2009, “U.S. farmers feed the planet,” http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/61525637.html)

Most Americans give little thought to agriculture policy or food production, except perhaps when deciding what to eat for dinner. We are spoiled. America's capacity to produce food is so advanced that we can purchase virtually any food we want, anywhere, at any time. Such productivity is unprecedented. Even with the recent spike in food costs, Americans spend only 10% of disposable income on food. It is the productivity of our farmers that allows us the disposable income to purchase those BlackBerries and flat screens that have become a necessity. In recent days, however, this food production system has come under attack. Both Time magazine and Michael Pollan, writing in The New York Times, have raised the question of whether low food prices are responsible for obesity and whether we should address it by reducing production to increase the cost of food. This question deserves an answer. The world's population is over 6 billion people, soon to be 7 billion or 8 billion. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to agriculture, passed away recently at the age of 95. Last year, Borlaug wrote to then-Sen. Barack Obama, noting, "Over the next 50 years, the world's farmers and ranchers will be called upon to produce more food than has been produced in the past 10,000 years combined, and to do so in environmentally sustainable ways." We can meet this challenge, but only if we use all the tools at our disposal. The "Green Revolution" and the use of biotechnology, which earned Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize, must be transported to Africa and all countries with the land and climate necessary to grow food. Biotechnology will help us reduce the use of fertilizers, protect the environment and use less water. The demands on our agriculture sector also will increase with the need to become energy independent. We can, literally, grow energy. Cellulosic fuels can be produced from trees, grass and a host of renewable crops. Obesity is the nation's No. 1 public health problem. It cannot and should not be minimized. Former Sens. George McGovern of South Dakota and Bob Dole of Kansas, who have led the country on nutrition policy for the past 30 years, have urged President Obama to convene a White House Conference on Obesity. But reducing agricultural production as a strategy to fight obesity ignores the needs of the poor both here and abroad. According to the United Nations, 1 billion of the world's 6 billion people do not have enough to eat. As is usually the case, children are the most vulnerable. In developing countries, many millions of children go to school hungry. Every day, 18,000 children die due to hunger - more people than live in many Wisconsin towns. That is why, according to the World Food Program, "In the poorest countries, school feeding programs are emerging as a common social safety net." Food is the critical tool for improving education, reducing the birth rate and helping in the fight against AIDS. We must consider agriculture policy from this vantage point. Our natural resources are, indeed, being depleted every day. Many experts expect that by 2100 water will be more precious than oil. Our soil, water and energy supply must be conserved. Last year, in the 2008 Farm Bill, Congress created a new National Institute of Food and Agriculture specifically to focus on nutrition, food safety, renewable energy, natural resources and how these impact agriculture. The bottom line is this: Farmers and ranchers feed the world, and they need to do more, not less. Agriculture policy in the United States must protect the environment and be based on science, but its primary goal is to feed the planet. The new secondary goal is to assist in energy independence. Let's keep our eye on the ball.

Food shortages destabilize Russia and China – cause global conflict.

Lynn 13 (Matthey, financial journalist based in London, January 26th 2013,“Food prices may be catalyst for 2013 revolutions,” http://www.marketwatch.com/story/food-prices-may-be-catalyst-for-2013-revolutions-2013-01-16)

So if you figure that rising food prices create revolts, and prices will rocket this year, then where might we see political turmoil? It is a question that matters to investors, because a revolution means a collapse in stock-markets. Just take a look at Egypt in 2011 — the Cairo index plunged from 7,200 to 3,600 as the regime fell. If the revolt is big enough, markets may tumble globally. Algeria is one obvious candidate. It was the one country that didn’t get caught up in the Arab Spring. But it has many of the same issues as Libya and Egypt. Don’t be surprised to see demonstrations on the streets there. Morocco may well get caught up in the turmoil. And food shortages may spell the end for President Bashar Assad in Syria. Greece is the second possibility. Unemployment is now at 27%. Many people are on the breadline — and bread is about to get a lot costlier. There are increasing reports of people having to rely on food handout in Athens and other major cities. Taxes are constantly being pushed higher to meet the deficit targets and wages are still being cut and jobs slashed. More expensive food could easily be the spark for an extremist party to seize power and take the country out of the euro. More worrying still, Russia. There have already been protests against the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin. Rising grain prices have toppled Russian leaders in the past — Putin could follow the czars into oblivion. It is the Russian grain harvest that has been especially badly hit, and this is still a country where poverty is widespread. Putin has stayed in power thanks to rising living standards. If they drop, his regime will be under pressure. Or, most seriously of all, China. It has grown much richer, but there are millions and millions of people who have moved to the new cities — if they start to go hungry that could prompt a wave of rebellions. Cold weather is playing havoc with food supplies there. Usually, it could import more food if it needed it. But this year that won’t be possible — or at least only at huge cost. Minor revolts in the Middle East don’t have the potential to knock more than local markets. Egypt was the major stock market in the region, and that has already been through a regime change. But a Greek exit from the euro, or a Russian or Chinese political rebellion, would massively destabilize the global economy — and send equity, bond and currency markets into turmoil. Whichever nation it is, it looks like food may be the most likely cause of turmoil in the markets this year.

2NC Natural Gas

The plan’s environmental regulations lead to too much red tape – kills growth of the natural gas industry

Zhu and Kebede 12 (Charlie Rebekah, Reuters Reporters, June 5th 2012, “Exxon Mobil warns red tape risks snuffing out gas boom,” http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/us-gas-world-exxon-idUSBRE8540G220120605)

(Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N), the world's largest publicly listed energy company, warned on Tuesday that too much government regulation could undermine a rapid global expansion of gas output from a range of unconventional sources. Helped by a boom in shale gas, Exxon Mobil has become North America's largest natural gas producer, but energy firms face pressure for tighter regulation of the industry over concerns about the impact of drilling on the environment and also public concern that U.S. gas prices could rise if the gas is exported. Exxon Mobil Chief Executive Rex Tillerson said governments had to ensure the right environment for future investments in gas projects. "Regulations should provide a clear, efficient roadmap for how to get things done, not a complex tangle of rules that are used to stop things from getting done," Tillerson told the World Gas Conference in the Malaysian capital. "If government puts the development of these new sources of energy at a standstill, they will find their economies walking backwards," he added. Tillerson did not explicitly single out U.S. policy, but later told Reuters the country needs a "sound" energy policy and that putting off such a policy was "not particularly useful". Executives who attended the conference said they assumed Tillerson's comments referred to the recent controversy over unconventional gas development in the United States and some said they were surprised by the forcefulness of his comments. "The recent North American experience in unconventional development has reminded the world of the value of competitive and free markets for improving the lives of consumers," Tillerson said. "But technological breakthroughs that allow for unconventional gas recovery emanate from investments and industry in private markets, they are not the result of government policies that pick winners and losers." U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has been under pressure to rein in energy exports from the Unites States to protect consumers and manufacturers from price spikes. The White House has said that while it is not opposed to exporting LNG, it will base its decision on whether or not to allow more gas export projects to proceed on an official analysis on the economic impact of sending gas abroad which will be completed later this year. The rapid rise in production of shale gas and oil trapped in difficult reservoirs has revolutionized the industry of the United States, the world's top fuel consumer, turning it from the biggest gas importer to a potential exporter. Lawmakers have called for the federal government to consider four factors when weighing energy exports: national security, energy security, economic impacts and environmental protection. ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS The surge in unconventional supplies will see the United States overtake Russia as the world's biggest natural gas producer in 2017, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday. The IEA expects total U.S. gas production to rise from 653 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2011 to 769 bcm in 2017. "Governing or setting policy and regulations based on the precautionary principle will stifle innovation and investment and bring development to a standstill," Tillerson said.

Nat gas is key to the economy and solves oil dependence

Entrega 13 (Pipelines Company, January 2^nd 2013, “The Importance of Natural Gas to the US Economy,” http://www.entregapipeline.com/the-importance-of-natural-gas-to-the-us-economy.php)

Natural gas is playing an increasingly important role in the US economy. Use of natural gas in the United States is growing as it is increasingly seen as a good alternative to oil. As the oil reserves in many parts of the world are being depleted, the availability of a viable alternative such as natural gas is becoming increasingly important. For the United States, the potential for natural gas to replace the role of oil in the economy is particularly important because it is one of the most oil dependent countries in the world. Natural gas is an attractive alternative for the US because it has the ability to produce natural gas domestically. The US has particularly large reserves of shale gas, which it has only recently been possible to exploit due to improvements in the technology. Increased exploitation of natural gas in the United States offers a means of reducing the country's dependence on oil and providing plenty of energy for use in people's homes and in industry. It will help the US economy to cope with the depletion of the world's oil reserves as peak oil production is reached and passed. It will also provide a secure source of energy that does not depend on sources of fossil fuels that lie abroad, often in unstable parts of the world such as the Middle East. The increasing use of natural gas in the US is also important for the country's economy because it can be produced domestically. This means that the natural gas industry can help to produce new jobs in the US and to make a significant input into the US economy. There are more than 6300 natural gas producers in the US, ranging from small companies to major energy producers. The US has over 530 processing plants for natural gas. These plants produce nearly 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year, which is distributed through the natural gas pipeline network, which includes more than 300,000 miles of piping across the entire country. The US natural gas pipelines have the capacity to transport more than 148 billion cubic feet of gas every day, moving it from the regions where it is produced to the places where it is used. The natural gas sector in the United States is growing in importance and it is providing new opportunities for employment and technological advancement. The US has at least a hundred years worth of natural gas available for exploitation. The natural gas sector contributes approximately 4 million jobs and over 385 billion dollars to the US economy. Natural gas provides the United States with a source of energy that will be able to provide a replacement for some of the power that is currently obtained from oil. Increasing use of natural gas in the US will help to reduce the country's dependence on oil. Natural gas in the United States is transported around the country and distributed to its users through a network of natural gas pipelines. More information about the natural gas pipelines that are used to transport natural gas can be found on the entregapipeline.com website.

Wars for oil go nuclear

Qasem 7 (Islam Yaisn, Doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and Social Sciences at the University of Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, July 9th 2007, “The Coming Warfare of Oil Shortage,” http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_islam_ya_070709_the_coming_warfare_o.htm)

Recognizing the strategic value of oil for their national interests, superpowers will not hesitate to unleash their economic and military power to ensure secure access to oil resources, triggering worldwide tension, if not armed conflict. And while superpowers like the United States maintain superior conventional military power, in addition to their nuclear power, some weaker states are already nuclearly armed, others are seeking nuclear weapons. In an anarchic world with many nuclear-weapon states feeling insecure, and a global economy in downward spiral, the chances of using nuclear weapons in pursues of national interests are high.

***AT***

AT: Thumpers (Generic)

Filter the link through environmental regulations—any other regulation doesn’t impact the private sector as much

Adler 96 (Jonathan H. Adler, American legal commentator and law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Property Rights, Regulatory Takings, and Environmental Protection, Competitive Enterprise Institute, March 31 1996, http://cei.org/studies-issue-analysis/property-rights-regulatory-takings-and-environmental-protection)

Federal environmental laws are not the sole source of so-called regulatory takings by the federal government. However they are the most prominent. For two decades, federal land-use control has been the dominant means of achieving many environmental objectives. Two federal laws, in particular, have been the focus of the debate over compensation for regulatory takings: the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA), the source of regulations limiting the development of wetlands.¶ Numerous legislative proposals have been introduced in response to the growing demand for a greater protection of private property. Twenty-three states have enacted property rights legislation of some kind. The two primary property rights proposals under consideration in Congress are S. 605 and H. R. 925, both of which would require the payment of compensation to landowners for regulatory takings.¶ Groups opposing compensation for regulatory takings suggest that requiring compensation for regulatory takings would impose an extreme financial burden upon the federal government. Such claims are overstated. Under most proposals, compensation is paid directly out of those funds appropriated to the agency responsible for the taking, and therefore would have no impact on the deficit. Requiring federal agencies to pay compensation for regulatory takings would also make agencies more aware of the financial risks of over-relying on land-use regulation to achieve statutory goals.¶ There is a fundamental distinction between government actions that incidentally affect land values -- positively or negatively -- and those that affect property values because they are directed at particular properties. Property values are not the fundamental issue in the property rights debate. Compensation should be paid when the federal government acts so as to deprive a property owner of a right to use and enjoy that property. Yet property rights, properly understood, do not include the right to injure or harm the person or property of another. This means that when the government limits or prohibits the use of property in a manner that is likely to harm another person or property -- what would be considered a nuisance under common law -- no compensation is called for. However, should the government limit the use of property for some other purpose, such as the provision of wildlife habitat or some other "public good," compensation should be paid.¶ Because the government does not pay for the costs of regulatory takings, it overuses coercive land-use regulations to achieve environmental goals, even when other approaches are available. Reviews of incentive-based wetland conservation programs have concluded that such programs are far more cost-effective than land-use regulation. Forcing agencies to pay for the private property rights that they take through regulatory action will encourage them to examine non-regulatory approaches to achieving their statutory goals. Being forced to bear the costs of regulation can markedly change agency behavior.

AT: Enviro Regs Now

We control direction of momentum-- federal protection initiatives are being shot down in the status quo—recent supreme court decision proves

Wolf 6/23 (Richard Wolf, USA Today Journalist, “Supreme Court limits greenhouse gas regulations”, USA Today, 6/23/14, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/23/supreme-court-greenhouse-gas/8567453/)

The court's liberal wing dissented from the main part of the decision, arguing that the EPA's re-interpretation of the Clean Air Act was reasonable in order to avoid an absurd over-regulation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide -- and would help the very industries seeking to overturn them.¶ "What sense does it make to read the (Clean Air) Act as generally granting the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and then to read it as denying that power with respect to the programs for large stationary sources at issue here?" Justice Stephen Breyer said.¶ Those four justices agreed with the second part of the ruling – that EPA can require greenhouse gas permits from industries already required to get the permits for other pollutants.¶ The high court ruled 5-4 in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualify as an air pollutant, even though their impact isn't as direct as others. That decision gave the EPA authority to regulate tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles. The stationary source regulation was the next step in the process.¶ Unlike other air pollutants, carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming are so ubiquitous that the EPA raised the law's threshold level requiring a permit from 100 tons per year to at least 75,000 tons. Opponents decried the move as a major rewrite of the law – something only Congress can do.¶ Industries, a coalition of conservative states, Republican lawmakers and others claimed the Clean Air Act of 1970 doesn't empower the administration to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other stationary sources. They say the regulations, begun in 2010, risk jobs and economic development.¶ Although the ruling was only a partial victory for industry, several trade groups expressed support.¶ "Today's decision will help to ensure that permitting requirements fall within the authority granted by Congress," said Harry Ng, vice president and general counsel of the American Petroleum Institute. "It is a stark reminder that the EPA's power is not unlimited."¶ The magic of Scalia's middle-ground ruling, however, was that it attracted huzzahs from environmentalists as well.¶ "EPA's foundational authority under the Clean Air Act to protect Americans' health from the clear and present danger of climate pollution is rock solid," said Vickie Patton, general counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund.¶ The administration, along with environmental groups and a number of other states, including California and New York, said the Clean Air Act was meant to address all air pollutants, including greenhouse gases. Once the administration addressed auto and truck emissions, they argued, the next natural step was power plants.¶ The EPA's decision to greatly multiply the level of emissions requiring a permit was simply common sense, proponents said. Otherwise, more than 80,000 midsize businesses, hospitals, universities, apartment buildings and shopping malls would have required permits.

Major victories for industry—political pressure—their thumpers only put us on the brink

Sloan 7/1 (Melanie Sloan , Journalist for Roll Call, “Why the EPA Reversed Its Position on Renewable Fuels | Commentary”, Roll Call, 7/1/14, http://www.rollcall.com/news/Why-the-EPA-Reversed-Its-Position-on-Renewable-Fuels-234384-1.html)
In late 2013, the oil industry scored a major victory over ethanol producers when the Obama administration proposed decreasing the level of biofuel that must be blended into gasoline. A 2007 law supported by both the Bush and Obama administrations requires biofuels, such as ethanol, be blended into fuel supplies. Each year, the Environmental Protection Agency mandates the “renewable fuel standard” — the amount of biofuel that must be blended into fuel — and every year since the law was enacted, that amount has increased, never decreased. ¶ The EPA’s proposed cuts were also surprising in light of the administration’s general policy of moving Americans away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources. ¶ A team of reporters from Reuters investigated and found the Washington, D.C.-based investment firm the Carlyle Group, which owns two refineries in the Philadelphia area, and Delta Air Lines, which also owns a refinery, appear to have played a significant role in persuading the administration to reverse course. ¶ At these companies’ behest, Reps. Robert A. Brady, D-Pa., and Patrick Meehan, R-Pa., lobbied administration officials — including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, White House economic adviser Ronald Minsk and National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling — to push the EPA to lower the biofuels mandate, arguing the cost of ethanol is too high.¶ While the administration claims it listened to all sides of the debate and the EPA says the decision is related to production and infrastructure issues, Brady was indiscreet enough to brag, “I talked to the vice president and I told him what the issue was, and he said, ‘We’ve got to try to fix that,’ and we fixed it.”¶ This wouldn’t be the first time the Obama EPA has bowed to political pressure. Pro Publica reported that in 2010, when the Uranium Energy Corp. sought a permit from the EPA to pollute underground wells that supplied drinking water, agency scientists opposed the plan over concerns that radioactive material might contaminate the water. The plan seemed dead until late 2011, when the company hired a well-connected Washington lobbyist and prolific fundraiser who contacted the EPA’s second in command to press its case. The EPA reversed its position and approved the permit, allowing Uranium Energy to pollute the aquifer, albeit in a smaller area than originally proposed. A retired EPA employee involved in the matter expressed dissatisfaction with the agency’s flip.

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