Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank goodness it did not happen. But we are not out of the woods yet.

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency and environmental activists frequently claim that climate change will disproportionately affect poor and minority communities. In their view, this justifies unprecedented environmental regulations, like EPA's pending “Clean Power Plan” (CPP) to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas-fueled power plants 30% by 2030.
But what effect will the regulation itself have on poor and minority communities?

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, we are told. Will President Obama be playing golf when terrorists attack the U.S. power grid so as to force a massive, multi-state blackout? Or will he and colleagues like Secretary of State Kerry and EPA Administrator McCarthy remain wholly focused on their own efforts to shut down the power grid through regulations and (as they did with BenGhazi and the Fort Hood shooter) refuse even to brand such an act as terrorist?

EPA assumes zero benefits from the burning of fossil fuels while proclaiming heavy costs from increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Now, as Greens push for increasing the alleged "social cost of carbon" from the current 36/ton (up from $22/ton back in 2010) to an astonishing $43/ton, Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen show that EPA is violating federal law (including Executive Order 12866) by ignoring the massive benefits to society (some $70 trillion in the U.S. alone) from fossil fuels use.

To justify their steady stream of anti-fossil fuel “climate change prevention” regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and other federal agencies have invented the “social cost of carbon” concept. It attaches arbitrary monetary values to the alleged impacts of using hydrocarbons and emitting carbon dioxide – and thereby enables government agencies to say the energy that powers 80% of our U.S. economy imposes enormous costs on society … which expensive, punitive regulations will prevent. However, the entire exercise is arbitrary, of questionable merit and validity, illegal, and even fraudulent. Most ridiculous of all, in violation of an important 1993 executive order, the federal methodology does not even consider one single aspect of the countless benefits that hydrocarbon energy provides to modern societies. In fact, if they considered both costs and benefits of carbon and carbon dioxide, federal officials would find that the benefits of carbon outweigh the costs by as much as 500 to 1!