re: #5 Obdicut

Comparing CO2 to water is stupid.

The idea that any law, no matter its actual meaning, can usefully and therefore justly be reinterpreted to say anything that it would be convenient for it to have said, is stupid.

If the law under which the EPA operates were to be applied to CO2, to the letter, no coal fired power plant could operate today. This means that putting CO2 under the sway of that law will not be, and cannot be, done forthrightly. Instead, the release of CO2 will be allowed, to some extent, law notwithstanding. Who gets the exemptions, though, will be a political process, not a legal process.

The quantitative limits spelled out in the EPA’s regular notion of pollutant are tiny in the context of water, or CO2. The smallness of the numerical limits on allowable releases demonstrates that no chemical that exists naturally in massive quantities and that is bound up in ordinary operation of industrial civilization was intended to count as a “pollutant”.

The “end justifies the means” attitude toward how the EPA should treat CO2, if it prevails, will prevail more widely than in its application to CO2.