Ken Cuccinelli was elected the Attorney General of Virginia in November 2009. From 2002 to 2009 he was a member of the Virginia State Senate. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he has an M.A. in international relations from George Mason University and a J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law and Economics. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 1, 2011, in the “First Principles on First Fridays” lecture series sponsored by Hillsdale Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. . Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”
Last week we Common Sense University outlined the first part of Ken’s speech. Here is the second and final part of Ken Cuccinelli’s speech:
Liberty as an Environmental Principle
As bad as the federal health care law is, the economic consequences of what the EPA has in store for us will be equally damaging to our freedom and our economy. Thus the EPA is another front in Virginia’s federalism fight.
In December 2009, the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants dangerous to public health because they are alleged to cause global warming. This finding gave the agency the immense power to regulate CO2 emissions—and remember, this dangerous pollutant, carbon dioxide, is what we exhale from our bodies every second of every day.
For the ruling, the EPA relied primarily on data from a United Nations global warming report. Emails leaked in 2009 in the Climategate scandal showed that some of the world’s prominent climatologists manipulated data to overstate the effects of carbon dioxide on the environment. Much of the U.N. report relied on that questionable data, and the EPA relied on that report. Since the revelations from the leaked emails became public, some scientists involved in the report have had to back off some of their positions and research. Renowned climate researcher Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a long-time proponent of the global warming theory, admitted recently that there is no question that data in the U.N. report was misleading, and that “it is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data” that would work against the theory of rapid global warming in the last century.
Pursuant to this, in February 2010, my office petitioned the EPA to reopen its hearings on greenhouse gases and review new evidence. Instead it ignored our request—in fact, it ignored the law. So we filed a federal lawsuit to force the hearings to be reopened, and we are still awaiting our day in court.
If the EPA is allowed to move forward with its regulation of carbon dioxide, costs to every American household are projected to increase by $3,000 a year due to higher prices for energy, food, clothing, and any other goods that require energy to manufacture or transport. Talk about taxing the poor!
In a document the EPA published on regulating greenhouse gas emissions in cars and light trucks, it admits that its new rules would add about $950 to the price of each new vehicle. And buried deep in the report, the EPA’s own models show that over the next 90 years these regulations would only reduce temperature increases by less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit. Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, in testimony before Congress, called this amount of temperature difference “immeasurable.” But that has not stopped the agency from trying to move the new auto regulations forward.
Greenhouse gas regulations will also cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in increased energy costs, and could price several industries out of business or force them overseas, resulting in permanent job losses.
These are serious consequences of decisions made by unelected bureaucrats. All we are asking the EPA to do is to look at all the data, not just the data that supports the pre-conceived views of the people in charge.
For my challenges to these rules and to the federal government, I am accused of being a flat-earther and an enemy of science. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not only an attorney; I was also an engineer. As a former engineer, I have a certain trust in science: the math, the scientific method, the certainties of the laws of physics, and the objective quest for new answers. But when science gets tainted by politics and money, and facts are set aside in the name of advancing a political agenda, it is no longer science.
And contrary to the image some in the media have created, I do not have a battle with environmental protection. In fact, my office works in close coordination with our Virginia regulatory agencies to enforce environmental laws. I also have seven children who will be on this earth for the better part of this century, and I have a vested interest in seeing that they have clean air, water, and land.
But I also have a vested interest in seeing that my children have the opportunity to get good jobs and achieve at least the same standard of living we have today. That means we have to balance care for our environment with care for our economy.
We also have to recognize that economic growth underwrites environmental protection. Wealthy countries pay for environmental improvement, and healthy economies are critical to it. The only places on earth that have strived for a clean environment share two key characteristics: free people and free markets. Economic success will help deliver environmental improvement far more effectively than any number of forcibly-applied regulations. Yet we are gradually suffocating our free market economy with command-and-control regulations from our federal government.
Freedom in the Balance
With the EPA’s attempts to regulate our lives by regulating the by-products of practically everything we buy and everything we do, and with the federal government’s attempt to assume the power to command us to buy its chosen health insurance, we face some of the most significant and unprecedented erosions of liberty in our lifetimes. And federalism—that tension between state sovereigns and the federal government—was designed for the very purpose of helping to preserve that liberty.
While we can derive some satisfaction from last November’s election results as a backlash against the centralization and growth of raw federal power, we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past where conservative victories were followed by liberal policies. We must ensure that the newly elected officeholders have learned from past mistakes. We must hold the representatives we put into office accountable to first principles, and then demand from them concrete action. For the failure of conservative principles has not been due to the principles themselves, but to the failure to fight for them.
At a time such as this, when principled conservatives do not control the reins of power in Washington, state attorneys general become the first line of defense against federal government overreach. When I ran for Attorney General of Virginia, I said that if the federal government crossed certain lines, I would challenge it. Unfortunately, we have a federal government that is giving us more opportunities to challenge it than I would like. But we are keeping our promise. With fellow Virginians and the American people, we have planted our flag and we are taking a stand. And if we are successful, future generations of Americans will have a chance to enjoy the liberty that has made America the envy of the world.
Success in this fight for federalism is critical, for as Ronald Reagan warned us:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.