There you have it. Note that I'm still being charitable by granting that you will address the relevant points, not continue whistling at the wind.
You're not letting the conversation go
anywhere because you keep refusing to engage with anyone when they respond to these points.
We are having a conversation about what the Agency's scope and where it has exceeded that scope, which is very different.
I, and lots of other people, including at least one lawyer no less, addressed this by arguing that GHGs are within the EPA's scope (and probably even within its mandate) and that you haven't provided any evidence that they aren't. A big part of this topic was in what sense GHGs are a pollutant and should fall within the EPA's scope. Lots of people wrote reasonable posts explaining this by citing issues like ocean acidification. You either ignored them, responded condescendingly, or provided terse and unsupported arguments in response. Cutlass wrote a post concerning the philosophical rights-based issues at stake, which was obviously based on an assumption that the scope of governmental agencies should encompass issues that are important to the individual rights of American people and the common good. You ignored him completely making it a waste of his time. I also questioned why it even matters if GHGs are within the EPA's scope; anyone who takes the issue of climate change seriously should obviously care more about that than matters of scope. Part of discussing the "relevant points" is determining if they're even
relevant.
We are having a conversation about what the Agency's scope and where it has exceeded that scope, which is very different.
So yeah, here's one of the relevant points. Again, you did absolutely nothing to show that the EPA exceeded its scope under Obama, while plenty of people argued that its scope includes (and certainly
ought to include) GHGs.
The Agency is going back to the basics. Controlling greenhouse gasses does not contribute to clean water and does not necessarily contribute to clean air. You would need to dig into the definitions of clean air. Those are the purview of the EPA. The current movement is to focus on getting permits, rulings and findings concerning clean air and water out in a timely fashion.
A bunch of people argued this is totally false. And Trump proposed budget cuts to the EPA's ability to focus on the "basics," which you've totally ignored. And yet again, anyone who really cares about climate change would find this irrelevant.
As you say, Congress is the place to go to make a change. The EPA is tailoring its activities to existing law. If you want to extend the scope to include greenhouse gasses, pass a new law.
You conceded a long time ago that the EPA has authority from the Supreme Court to focus on GHGs. So we have "the EPA can choose to research/regulate GHGs [via Supreme Court]" and "Pruitt/Trump are choosing not to [via it's not, according to you, in the mandate]." Anyone who takes climate change seriously is dismayed at the choice not to, regardless of mandate. It's also very debatable that GHGs are not within the mandate and you've made very little effort to show that they aren't. And once again, Trump/Pruitt don't actually care about doing the things you believe to be within the mandate.
This is a bizarre discussion because half the posters think that the Agency is dedicated to eliminating toxic substances from air, water and soil. The other half wants to junk that and focus on climate change.
Up to this point it was uncontestable that the EPA under Trump/Pruitt, by reducing their focus on GHGs, is either violating the mandate or doing substantial harm to the planet by choosing to pursue the bare minimum requirements of the agency. At this point you realized you needed to fabricate some kind of "harm" associated with going beyond the mandate (supposing the mandate doesn't encompass GHGs, which once again, you never showed) and this argument was the result. This argument was shown by multiple people to be intellectually dishonest rubbish. I put some effort into explaining all the assumption built into this argument and just how much you'd have to prove for this argument to work. You ignored all these responses and started complaining that we weren't focusing on the "relevant points," even though you're the one who let the thread get away from the "relevant points."
The EPA has decided to sharply curtail its activities regarding greenhouse gases. According to the men that instigated this curtailment, it was a swamp. Those men are President Trump and Scott Pruitt. Their views are relevant to the decision
And so here we are at this remarkably anodyne claim: "Trump/Pruitt did a thing and that's ok cause they had a reason." That's the only thing you're entitled to say 5 pages in. And that excludes offering commentary on our failure to address the "relevant points," which you have no warrant for discussing until you remedy everything I've listed here.
