President Obama’s big speech to the Global Warming crew in Copenhagen today apparently did nothing significant other than outrage the Chinese (who admittedly might have been looking for a good reason to get outraged and abandon this insane orgy of decadent Western angst). It appears that the summit that wasn’t going to achieve anything anyway is failing to achieve anything with a big exclamation point tacked on. At least, so I personally hope.

But with the recent official finding by the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington that carbon dioxide poses a danger to the environment and to the health of Americans, and their readiness to start issuing proclamations and regulations to help save us all, one has the sense of having been watching a battle rage in a foreign land only to discover that meanwhile the enemy has encamped in one’s bedroom.

From Charles Krauthammer:

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means more than a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

[...]

With the Senate blocking President Obama’s cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d’etat served as the administration’s loud response to [concerned Democratic Sen. Jim] Webb: The hell we can’t. With this EPA “endangerment” finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend clean-air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.

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