Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced this week that he has joined nine other state attorneys general in suing the Joe Biden Administration, all to save several people’s financial livelihoods.
Carr, in a press release, said Biden and members of his administration want to carry out an act of executive overreach that will kill thousands of jobs throughout the United States and threatens to impose more burdens and harms on the American people.
In a recent Executive Order, Biden established a group of federal appointees to set a value based on global environmental damages from climate change. These values include the social cost of carbon, the social cost of methane, and the social cost of nitrous oxide. The president further required federal agencies to immediately apply these numbers in regulatory actions and other types of decision-making.
“This executive order is nothing but a license for gross federal overreach that will have potentially life-altering consequences for hard-working Georgians,” Carr said in the press release.
“The President is using arbitrary numbers to justify regulating anything and everything, and we will not allow this egregious overstep of Executive Branch authority.”
Economists, according to Carr’s press release, describe the social cost of carbon as “the most important number you never heard of,” the press release said.
“That is because carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are by-products of everyday activities in America today, like the production of electricity to light our homes and highways, natural gas for our buses and plant operations, farming operations, a wide variety of industrial activities, the production of cement and other construction materials, and waste disposal. They are among the most common and prevalent by-products of human economic activity,” according to Carr’s press release.
Carr continued:
It is no exaggeration to say the use of these values result in the most expansive and expensive federal regulatory initiative in history. President Biden’s executive fiat will have wide-ranging impacts on decisions made by virtually every federal agency, including the Departments of Interior, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Environmental Protection, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Treasury. The president’s actions improperly and illegally change the way federal decision-making is conducted, including changing the cost-benefit analysis for nearly every significant agency action. This means federal agencies could use these estimates to arbitrarily assign massive costs or massive benefits, whichever they choose, to every regulatory action, to environmental impact studies, and to establish mitigation costs, and more. These values have the ability to fundamentally transform the entire regulatory structure of the federal government, as well as the way states conduct business and Americans live their lives.
By reviving a flawed Obama Administration scheme, Carr said the Biden Executive Order requires federal agencies to quantify the global damage of releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide.
“These are some of the most pervasive emissions of any developed economy and result from nearly every aspect of human life. For instance, carbon dioxide emits from burning carbon-based materials, like fossil fuel and firewood, but also results from chemical reactions like the manufacturing of cement. Agricultural activities, like soil and waste management, result in roughly 75 percent of our nitrous oxide emissions, while 27 percent of methane emissions stem from livestock excretions. Methane also emits from using petroleum and natural gas,” according to Carr’s press release.
“This unacceptable and unauthorized executive overreach touches every part of American life: the generators powering our homes, the dishwashers cleaning our tableware, the lawnmowers cutting our grass, the firewood keeping us warm, the livestock and produce feeding our families, and every breath we exhale. By executive fiat, the Biden Administration is not only arbitrarily and improperly taxing American productivity and everyday life, but also creating a scheme that can justify virtually any decision to regulate.”
According to the press release, other states that joined in the lawsuit include Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Georgia AG Chris Carr” by Office of the Attorney General.
