Federal Judiciary

Five civil-rights organizations recently condemned the EPA?s plans to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions as part of its war on so-called ?global warming.? These groups? leaders argue that the EPA?s December 7 ?Endangerment Finding? and pending anti-CO₂ regulations will slam Americans hard and blacks and other minorities hardest.

?President Obama wants to price us out of energy,? Harry Alford of the National Black Chamber of Commerce told Public Radio International. ?This is a war on how we live in America, and don?t regard it lightly. We need to fight them, we need to fight them hard, fight them fierce.? Alford represents some 100,000 black-owned companies.

A recent Affordable Power Alliance study foresees dire consequences from EPA restrictions on traditional energy production as it chases the chimera of global warming.

?We estimated that implementation of the EPA Finding would#...#significantly reduce U.S. GDP every year over the next two decades, and by 2030 GDP would be about $500 billion less? than otherwise. The report also predicts the EPA?s destruction of 2.5 million jobs by 2030.

APA projects that ?EPA carbon restrictions would greatly increase U.S. energy costs,? specifically by 50 percent for gasoline, 75 percent for residential natural gas, and 100 percent for industrial natural gas by 2030.

APA expects the black poverty rate to grow from 24 percent to 30 percent, and Hispanic poverty from 23 percent to 28 percent.

Due largely to their already low average incomes, APA explains, ?rising energy costs have a disproportionately negative effect on the ability of minority families to acquire other necessities such as food, housing, childcare, or healthcare. Essentially, the EPA Finding will have the effect of a discriminatory tax based on race.?

Blacks and Hispanics ?see more sick days from work and school, and increased medical costs due to the ravages of greenhouse gas pollution,? the EPA stated in its defense. ?We must act to stop this now, while seizing the opportunity to bring green jobs and green small businesses.?

Green, shmeen, replied Carlos Duran of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. The APA study ?shows a net loss of jobs in our communities,? Duran told PRI. ?We don?t care about green jobs, or brown jobs, or purple jobs. We care about net jobs.?

With U.S. unemployment at 9.7 percent, there is a broad national appetite for work and a serious hunger for it among blacks, 16.5 percent of whom are jobless. The Hispanic unemployment rate is 12.6 percent.

?It is tragic that America?s first black president would deny economic opportunity to so many people of color,? said Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis.

The Obama administration should deregulate, privatize, and slash taxes, spending, and borrowing so that corporations and entrepreneurs can reinvigorate America?s job-creation and wealth-generation machines. Shoveling regulatory gravel into them does not help.

As for so-called ?global warming,? Washington should not act before answering serious questions about the earth?s temperature record. After the Climategate scandal at England?s Climate Research Unit (CRU), London?s Meteorological Office announced that it is reevaluating 160 years of climate records. Alas, American climatologists rely heavily on CRU?s now-dubious statistics.

Meanwhile, NASA concedes that its temperature data are less than reliable. When a USA Today correspondent asked NASA in 2007 if its climate database was ?more accurate? than others, FoxNews.com reported last March 30, NASA climate scientist Dr. Reto Ruedy steered the journalist elsewhere: ?My recommendation to you is to continue using the [National Climatic Data Center?s] data for the U.S. means and [CRU?s] data for the global means.? Of course, CRU?s findings today look dodgy. NASA now says it must ?check for local problems with the placement of thermometers relative to possible building obstructions.?

Until top transatlantic scientists stop scratching their heads about whether Earth is unnaturally warming or cooling, would the EPA please kindly stop torturing black people?

-- Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on April 22, 2010 (boomark / email).