WASHINGTON   –  “After several years of being told that global warming and climate change science are certainties about which there can be no debate, the American people now have more good reasons than ever to be skeptical.

The average adult human being exhales, mostly carbon dioxide, more than 20,000 times per day.  That means 300 million Americans “breathe out” some 60 trillion times every day.  Sounds like time for the federal government to step in, eh?

Global warming and climate change are now being used to promote new rules at the Environmental Protection Agency to treat carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and to give the agency license to regulate the gas as it sees fit.  That regulation almost certainly will include onerous new restrictions, rules, surcharges and taxes on gas, electricity, manufacturers and homeowners B anyone and everyone who turns on a light or starts up an automobile.  With the potential to touch every business and family in the United States, the new power of EPA to enforce climate change policies will be an overwhelming hardship for our economy.

The Administrator of the EPA has promised to use her newly-declared power with common sense, but the concentration of authority within the EPA should be a cause for concern among Americans in every part of the country and all walks of life.  The EPA already makes it as difficult as possible for members of Congress to conduct oversight and investigations of policies on which we disagree.

More often than not, the desires of the EPA to restrict economic activity, regulate agriculture and industry, and force changes on the American people are in direct conflict with the Congress= responsibility to work in the best interests of Americans and our economy.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a version of climate change legislation earlier this year; I voted against it.  That bill was estimated to cost Missouri trillions of dollars in economic activity and thousands of jobs each year it was in effect.  The effort has foundered under pressure in the U.S. Senate.  However, EPA could inflict policies and regulations with ramifications just as bad, if not worse, for our national economy.

The solution must be two-fold.  First and most importantly, Congress must do more than stop the cap-and-trade legislation from gaining final passage.  We must also restrict the EPA from unilaterally implementing new standards for greenhouse gases that go even further than the bad legislation in the House.  Then, second, we must make every effort possible through the legislative as well as the judicial branches of government to hold EPA to standards of accountability when they pick and choose scientific findings to substantiate these regulations.”