Red Guard Regan Out

Incoming President-again Trump has announced his choice to replace Michael “Red Guard” Regan as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency – which stopped protecting the environment back in the ’70s, if it ever did at all.

It is a fact – as in objectively true – that in the case of vehicle-caused air pollution, there hasn’t been any to speak of since the late ’90s and that was 30 years ago. Catalytic converters (standardized in 1975) and computer-controlled electronic fuel injection (standardized by the late 1980s) cleaned up more than 95 percent of the previously uncontrolled harmful byproducts of internal combustion. Unfortunately, the average person is unaware of these facts and so continues to believe that “emissions” are an ongoing problem.

They aren’t.

Since the ’90s, the EPA has pretended to be protecting the environment by pretending that a further fractional reduction in vehicle exhaust emissions constitutes a meaningful reduction in pollution. But the EPA apparatchiks never explain that the “20 percent” reduction they propose to require amounts to 20 percent of something less than 1 percent.

For the obvious reason.

Lately, the EPA redefined “emissions” to encompass carbon dioxide – which was never previously considered a pollutant because the “emissions”of this gas do not in any way cause or contribute to air pollution or harm “the environment,” either. We need carbon dioxide “emissions” – so that plants can produce the oxygen we must have to breath and the food we must have to remain alive.

The Communists – let’s be frank about who and what they are – have managed to pathologize things that are good for people in order to get them to accept things that are very bad for people.

And the environment.

Such as battery-powered vehicles, for instance. The Communists say it is necessary – for “the environment” – to strip mine the earth to get the lithium and cobalt and other materials that are necessary to make battery packs that weigh almost as much (in some cases, more than) a small car weighed back in the ’70s and to pollute oceans of groundwater to leach out the lithium for these batteries. That it is necessary to promote – via subsidization on the one hand and regulatory banning of gas-powered alternatives to them on the other hand – the manufacture of high-dollar, high-performance EVs for the affluent who can afford to buy them – for the sake of “the environment.”

It’s bullshit, of course. Green became the new red a long ago. The people affected by this shuck-and-jive begin to understand, as evidenced by the massive repudiation of the Communists last week. They have come to understand that “the environment” has little if anything to do with that but much to do with their enserfment.

And they have tired of it.

So it is good news to hear that Michael “Red Guard” Regan will be replaced by someone who isn’t green – that is to say, someone who is not red – as head of the EPA. That man will be former representative (from New York) Lee Zeldin, who just-barely lost the 2022 election for governor to the odious Kathy Hochul, a Communist who used “sickness” in much the same way that Communists such as Regan have used “the environment” to impose Communism on Americans.   

After the announcement of his appointment, Zeldin said:

“I am deeply honored to have been asked by President Trump to serve in his Cabinet. As EPA Administrator, we will restore American energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, make the United States the global leader of Artificial Intelligence advancement, and slash the red tape holding back American workers from upward economic mobility.” 

This strongly suggests that he, too, knows that green is red.

That the pushing by Communists such as Regan of battery powered vehicles has as much to do with “the environment” as “masks” had to do with “stopping the spread.”

The jig may finally be up.

It remains to be seen, though, whether Zeldin will pull a Romney and “mend” rather than end the regulatory assault on the car industry and – more importantly – the right of the people to buy the type of vehicle that suits them rather than an ideological cadre of Communists who have assumed de facto dictatorial power within regulatory apparats such as the EPA. And end must be put to the federal apparat having any “role” at all in deciding how many miles-per-gallon the vehicles we choose to buy (and which for that reason, the vehicle manufacturers choose to offer) get. People have the right to buy fuel-inefficient vehicles – if they suit their needs – and the manufacturers have the right to sell them.

Just the same as the supermarket has the right to sell tomahawk ribeyes alongside ground chuck. Let the market – free exchange – determine what is bought and available for sale.

Will Zeldin end every grift that has helped to push EVs onto what has not been a market for years now? Will EVs be obliged to compete for buyers on their merits – and for what they actually cost?

Will he explain to the people that “emissions” are now and have been the equivalent of “asymptomatic spreaders” since the ’90s and that – accordingly – the EPA’s “mission” has been accomplished? Will he – at the very least – require that any new regulation be justified on the basis of tangible benefit that outweighs the costs imposed?

We shall soon see.

But at least for now things are looking up.

. . .

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