Rep. Joe Barton: More Brilliance

Just ran across a quote from Joe Barton, one of the Texas delegation in the US House who is the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Grist quotes Barton from an interview that appeared in Newsmax, regarding his fears that the EPA could regulate marathon runners under its authority to regulate sources of CO2, Barton Worries that EPA Will Regulate Runners:

Barton says the average healthy adult exhales between four-tenths of a ton and seven-tenths of a ton of CO2 a year.

“So if you put 20,000 marathoners into a confined area, you could consider that a single source of pollution, and you could regulate it,” Barton says. “The key would be whether the EPA said that 20,000 people running the same route was one source or not.”

What the hell?  This is what he thinks is going to break the back of efforts to regulate carbon dioxide?  Stoking fears that marathon racers will be regulated?  Maybe a more effective route would be to claim that any mass gathering of people could be considered a single source, like the Super Bowl or the Final Four.  Marathoners are a rather small slice of the American population to make much of a difference but if you could convince football fans that they were somehow threatened by the EPA, that could change things in a big way!

Comments

[K]

You do us proud, Mr. Barton. Even more at Reappropriate: http://www.reappropriate.com/?p=1337

[g.]

Yes, Barton's explanation of how all that oil got trapped under Alaska is that as the Anchorage Marathon was passing under an unstable glacier, the glacier slid and fell, trapping all 20,000 runners under the ice where they breathed and breathed and all the pressure from the weight of the glacier turned the CO2 they released into oil, coal and diamonds.