EPA's carbon planning emulates communism

The EPA, America's major gang of official bureaucratic green brains, decided to write down a plan that every American source of energy should obey:

U.S. to unveil sweeping rules to cut power plant pollution (Reuters)
Obama to announce controversial emissions limit on power plants (Fox News)

The word "pollution" in that sentence is a piece of a dirty toxic propaganda, of course. In reality, they talk about CO2 which is no pollution in any sense – it is a natural gas that unavoidably accompanies a big part of the essential economic activities in the modern world and that is the primary source of the biological material within plants – and therefore also animals.

By 2030, the coal burners have to emit 30% less carbon dioxide than in 2030, and so on. Will they? Is that possible? I don't know. America may need much more coal in 2030 than it needs today and it will emit more CO2 emissions because it's not economically feasible to filter it; America may need much less coal due to the fracking boom and other, known or unknown technological alternatives and other reasons. What's more important is that the stupid green brains don't know the answer at all. These people exhibit a hardwired hardcore communist way of thinking, or the lack of it.



The ability to draw infantile pictures isn't the same thing as the ability to do science or the ability to wisely manage the economy.

The idea is that a group of enlightened leftists sits down and thinks about the best numbers that everyone should achieve in 5, 10, or 20 years for everyone to be optimally happy. And everyone else is just obliged to realize what these superior brains have outlined. That's how countries are supposed to build a rosy future. Does it work?




The reality is, of course, that these brains are heavily inferior and virtually every constraint they try to impose on anyone else is harmful. These individuals are so screwed, in fact, that they haven't even been capable of understanding that it's the free market where prices adapt on a daily basis (or faster) in order to regulate what's needed, and not random guesses by clueless yet arrogant bureaucrats, that directs the work of every human and every company in a way that optimizes their well-being in the near and distant future.




Needless to say, there is no rational basis for the numbers they have emitted. They said that the emissions have to drop by 30% by 2030. It could also have been 15% or 60%. It's a random number. The right value can't be calculated in any way. Guesses like that are pure speculations. If an important company is obliged to distort all of its business in order to satisfy a random number extracted by a bureaucrat whose market value is more than 1 million times lower than the value of the company from his aß – still he or she considers himself or herself to be more important than the company itself, perhaps than all companies in the U.S. or the world – it dramatically influences the econonomic output, efficiency, and profitability of the company and it indirectly affects everyone else.

If the plan turns out to be impossible to achieve while the company remains in the black numbers, what will happen? Well, the company may be closed. Or it may befriend or bribe a bureaucrat to get an exemption. It may go bust because of some goddamn green terrorists who have hijacked the EPA. Or the energy prices may go up five-fold so that you will spend 1/3 of your income for energy – which also raises the prices of other goods and services because they contain energy, too. No one has managed to neutralize these terrorists before it was too late so pretty much everyone may have to pay dearly.

We in the post-socialist Europe have the experience that allows us – and gives us the moral duty, I would say – to accurately point out that and why the EPA terrorists are toxic and deluded trash – not only from the viewpoint of those who hold the coal corporate stocks (and the Republican and Democratic deputies that represent states that power America) but for more or less everyone else. The planning has always been harmful and it was harmful at several levels.

First of all, a key feature of the planning is that the plan is almost never fulfilled. The five-year plans in communism, and to a lesser extent also the analogous four-year plans in Nazism, were a wishful thinking. (The difference between Hitler, Stalin, and EPA is that Hitler had 4-year plans, Stalin had 5-year plans, and the EPA has 6-year plans and longer ones.) Nevertheless, they existed and forced everyone to modify his or her expectations. Because these expectations turned out to be wrong, imbalances on the market almost always emerged. Because it doesn't really matter whether you fail to fulfill the plan by 10% or 30%, people cease caring once things go wrong so things get increasingly bad. There was an excess of UV or, much more frequently, the deficit of XY. People couldn't buy it and other parts of the economy didn't have it either. So there was a deficit of CD as well, and so on (CD may have stood for compact disks – there were none – or anything else). In a free (or at least "partly free"), capitalist economy, the work and efforts dynamically shift towards activities that are more profitable, e.g. the production of products and services suffering from a shortage – which have therefore become more expensive. But in a planned economy, it's not really possible because the individual subjects are constrained by plans and most of them fail.

Another problem is that even if the super-arrogant planners, whether they're in Hitler's Planning Commission or Stalin's Planning Commission or the EU's Planning Commission or the EPA, could design a realistic plan – if they could guess correctly – which is unlikely because if someone at the EPA were competent as a manager, he or she would probably work for a big company and not the EPA – this realistic plan would still be harming the economy. Without the plan – without this constraint – inventions and various other improvements sometimes emerge at a pretty much random, mostly unpredictable place of the economy which is suddenly able to produce more products of a given kind, or to produce them more cheaply. Through the lowered prices etc., such a development modifies the behavior of anyone else who interacts with this "now evolved" sector. This progress is heavily disfavored by any plan because results that are "better than expected" violate the plan, too. One has to send workers home if things become much easier to be produced.

So even if the carbon dioxide were harmful in some way, this communist-style planning based on random numbers that a pack of clueless arrogant bureaucrats has made up would cause more harm than benefits. The production that Hitler or Stalin were planning was at least useful for the economy or its parts. What the EPA is planning isn't useful for anyone because CO2 is a beneficial gas we call life whose positive roles are uncountable and whose negative impact is pretty much non-existent. Even this elementary point – an elementary point that every sufficiently intelligent schoolkid understands after she learns something about fire, photosynthesis, cement, and fermentation ;-), and before she is 10 years old – is just too difficult for the green brains at the EPA.

The EPA – and analogous institutions in European and other countries – may have played a positive role in the past. But these days, they are purely harmful organizations that should be liquidated and those who have ever worked on CO2-related plans in these institutions should be arrested for years.

And that's the memo.

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Incidentally, when I mention this criminal activity based on the fraudulent claims about "alternative energy sources", the Czech Republic saw the beginning of a big trial against photovoltaic crooks today. They face up to 12 years in prison (each) for a fraudulent collection of photovoltaic subsidies – up to $100 million stolen from the public coffers. Ms Alena Vitásková, the boss of the Energy Regulation Bureaau, is charged, too – even though she liked to present herself as a brave warrior against the "renewable" crime. Too bad that many people managed to steal the subsidies from the coffers in ways that will be labeled legal. Everyone who is connected with this subsidized "renewable" business is of course the same criminal from an informal ethical viewpoint but unfortunately just some of them will be sent to the prison for those 12 years.