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Did you know that the EPA is considering naming Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant to be regulated under the Clean Air Act??!!  They have issued an "Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" as the first step in the development of their regulations.

These are model comments for individuals to send to the EPA by Friday night, 11:59pm.  You are welcome to send these out to your lists – and comments can be filed online at the link provided.

Thanks!

-          Andrew

Comment can be submitted through this link:

http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=SubmitComment&o=09000064806a0cfd

To the Assistant Administrator for Air and Water:

I am submitting comments in response to the EPA’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on “Regulating “Greenhouse” Gases Under the Clean Air Act.  The Docket ID is EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0318.

I am writing to urge EPA to not use the Clean Air Act to regulate so-called “greenhouse” gases.  The Supreme Court, in their decision Massachusetts v. EPA, left the door open for EPA to decline to regulate such gases, provided that no finding of “endangerment” was made.  I believe that there such a finding would be warrantless—and that not only does the science not bear out the classification of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a “pollutant”, but that any regulations that would be created out of such a classification would devastate the American economy, especially small business.

There are countless human activities that generate CO2, most especially breathing.  And while breathing itself wouldn’t be regulated (yet), the Clean Air Act’s mandates on how much of a substance can be released into the environment would mean that even a medium-sized office building or restaurant would now be treated like a major industrial polluter by EPA.  More than a million new buildings would become “facilities”, forcing the owners of those buildings into an incredibly complicated maze of regulations.

Currently, the regulatory state costs the American economy more a trillion dollars annually.  For small business owners (with fewer than 20 employees), this translates into more than $7700 per employee, per year.  Americans spent 8 billion hours doing paperwork last year, at a cost of more than $400 billion.  This regulatory regime would, by EPA’s own estimates, add millions more hours of paperwork, and impose regulatory costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  Moreover, there is no guarantee that any of the regulations that would be created would to anything to curb the emissions of CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse” gases, or that after spending all this money we would be doing anything to impact the environment.

Given the current economic hardship the nation is facing, our economy simply cannot handle the burden that such a draconian and far-reaching regulatory structure would impose.  When one considers the marginal benefits, it simply does not make sense.  Please do not classify CO2 as a pollutant.

Thank you.