Is it warm in here or is it just me?

So here I am awaiting the season's first serious snowfall, so of course I'm going to write about global warming.

What sparked this is that on Thursday Neil Cavuto - who in a height of hilarity calls his column on FauxNews.com "Common Sense" - referred to the recent snowfall in Las Vegas and used the occasion to (maybe you'd better sit down for this news) mock the idea of global warming.

Citing early cold spells in the Midwest and West, he says global warming is a case

[w]here you can kind of have your environmental cake and eat it too.

Where the earth getting warmer is warming, and the earth getting cooler is warming.

So nothing to stop Washington from big environmental spending.

The piece is, in short, more blah blah bullshit that equates weather with climate and even more, local weather with global climate. I'm reminded of a study from nine years ago about competence and self-awareness which revealed, among other things, that the most incompetent at a task actually tended to think more highly of their own abilities than those who did it well - because the latter tended to recognize their imitations while the former were so incompetent that they couldn't even recognize their shortcomings.

That is Neil Cavuto: so ignorant that he is incapable of recognizing how ignorant he is.

What makes this more than merely bitterly amusing is that Thursday was also the day that, in the words of environmentalists,

the nation's top environmental administrator has dropped "a lump of dirty coal" into Americans' Christmas stockings with a memo that says there is no reason to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions of coal plants.

The roots of this move actually lie in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA, in which a number of states, local governments, and private organizations sued the agency on the grounds that its failure to regulate greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide) constituted a failure of its legal duty under the Clean Air Act. The EPA replied it lacked the legal authority to regulate them and it was a bad idea in any event. In April 2007, SCOTUS bluntly rejected both those defenses, ruling that the EPA had the authority to regulate those emissions and if it refused to do so, it had to come up with a scientifically-valid reason for doing so, not simply a policy position. (The full text of the decision is here.)

The Shrub gang shuffled and stalled and a year later a motion signed by 17 states, three cities, and 13 environmental groups called on the Court to order the EPA to respond to the ruling.

(It turns out that the agency had responded in December, sending to the White House an email containing its findings that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be regulated. The WHS*, in one of those thumb-their-nose-at-reality moments that have marked their term, simply refused to open the email in order to claim they had never received a determination on the matter from the EPA.)

In June, the EPA, under White House pressure to strip its findings of any meaning, released

a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

That is, it simply ignored the Supreme Court and continued to stall on regulating greenhouse gases without offering a sound scientific reason.

But other events brought the issue to a head.

Just before Labor Day weekend in 2007, the EPA issued a permit for a power plant on the Ute Indian Reservation in eastern Utah. And, in doing so, the agency opted against considering the climate-change impacts of the proposed plant's emissions.

However, last month the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board rejected the permit.

[T]he judges said the EPA did not make a strong enough case for not requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.

In response, and this brings us to the present, on Thursday EPA Administrator Steven Johnson issued a memo "clarifying" agency rules,

set[ting] an agency-wide policy prohibiting controls on carbon dioxide emissions from being included in air pollution permits for coal-fired power plants and other facilities.

What he did was to declare that the section of regulations on the Prevention of Significant Deterioration, or PSD, permitting process which referred to "any pollutant that otherwise is subject to regulation under the [Clean Air] Act" would be understood to mean that those pollutants are subject only to "monitoring and reporting requirements" while the term "regulated pollutant" would be understood to mean

each pollutant subject to either a provision in the Clean Air Act or regulation adopted by EPA under the Clean Air Act that requires actual control of emissions of that pollutant.

If that seems like gobbledygook to you, it is, so let me translate: Johnson is saying the agency will not regulate greenhouse gases and the justification for doing so is that they haven't been regulated before.

If you doubt that, EPA rep Jonathan Shradar made it explicit, saying

the opinion simply codifies existing agency policy.

"It had been the unspoken policy of the agency," Shradar said. "All it does is put into policy what the agency has done for 30 years."

Of course, greenhouse gases were not a major consideration for most of those 30 years and for most of the time they have been, the EPA was insisting that it couldn't regulate them. Neither of those conditions now applies, which makes Shrader's statement pure hooey. And not even skillful hooey, sloppy hooey.

Still, it does mean that the agency's position can be put very simply: We refuse to regulate greenhouse gases - because we refuse to regulate greenhouse gases. Nyah, nyah. Talk to the hand.

While environmentalists were talking about lumps of coal in our national Christmas stocking, utility companies were falling all over themselves to praise Johnson's "brave" decision that, to hear them tell it, saved the nation, the world, indeed all of existence from the "catastrophic" effect (:cough: on their short-term profit) of regulating the sorts of emissions that are placing the health and safety of future generations at risk from global warming.

What's the line about knowing someone by the company they keep?

*WHS = White House Sociopaths