John Kerry: ‘Cap-and-trade’ is out

Democrats are trying yet another name change in their quest to cripple the American economy with greenhouse gas regulations.

Sen. John Kerry announced last week that the Senate climate bill due out this week will be a “pollution reduction” bill not a “cap-and-trade” bill. According to E&E Daily, Kerry said,

“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does. This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.”

So the Democrats have gone from “global warming” to “climate change” to “clean energy” because the public doesn’t buy what they’re selling. Now they’re jettisoning “cap-and-trade” hoping that some other name will stick to the wall.

While Democrats can call economically disastrous carbon caps whatever they want, they can’t buff the cap-and-trade turd or any other carbon cap regime into a public policy popsicle.

Hey John, why don’t you just call it the “Free Candy for Everybody Act of 2009”?

John Kerry: ‘Cap-and-trade’ is out

Democrats are trying yet another name change in their quest to cripple the American economy with greenhouse gas regulations.

Sen. John Kerry announced last week that the Senate climate bill due out this week will be a “pollution reduction” bill not a “cap-and-trade” bill. According to E&E Daily, Kerry said,

“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means. I don’t think the average American does. This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it’s a pollution reduction bill.”

So the Democrats have gone from “global warming” to “climate change” to “clean energy” because the public doesn’t buy what they’re selling. Now they’re jettisoning “cap-and-trade” hoping that some other name will stick to the wall.

While Democrats can call economically disastrous carbon caps whatever they want, they can’t buff the cap-and-trade turd or any other carbon cap regime into a public policy popsicle.

Hey John, why don’t you just call it the “Free Candy for Everybody Act of 2009”?

Creepy journalist of the day: John Broder

Check out John Broder’s  ‘hit’ piece on EPA economist Alan Carlin in today’s New York Times. Our comments in bold.

Behind the Furor Over a Climate Change Skeptic
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration. [As far as Broder is concerned, Carlin may just as well not even exist.]

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the surfacing of a few e-mail messages that seemed [Seemed = Didn’t really happen] to show that his contrarian [Contrarian = crazy] views on global warming had been suppressed by his superiors because they were inconvenient to the Obama administration’s climate change policy. Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said [Said = Lied] he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line.

But a closer look at his case and a broader [ Closer and Broader = The facts Broder likes] set of internal E.P.A. documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act paint a more complicated picture. [Complicated = Susceptible to fact-twisting]

It is true that Dr. Carlin’s supervisor refused to accept his comments on a proposed E.P.A. finding, since adopted, that greenhouse gases endangered health and the environment, and that he did so in a dismissive way. [And that’s all there really is to this story.]

But the newly obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, [Skepticism = Clinical insanity] which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit [Small = Obscure and insignificant] where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A. [And haven’t those “outside” scientists been challenged by others?]; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology [What’s Al Gore’s Ph.D in? Oh yeah, he doesn’t have one.]; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change [That’s proof that Carlin doesn’t know anything.]; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, [Keep in mind that we’re talking about an agency that set an arbitrary deadline to declare plant food and human exhalation a hazard to the public welfare.], the EPA’s as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview. [If Carlin indeed used the word “shoddy” to describe his work, I’m sure that it was in an entirely different context than Broder’s use.]

Dr. Carlin remains on the job and free to talk to the news media, [Because the Obama administration is merciful] and since the furor his comments on the finding have been posted on the E.P.A.’s Web site [Posting = Ignoring]. Further, his supervisor, Al McGartland, also a career employee of the agency, received a reprimand in July for the way he had handled Dr. Carlin. [Clearly, in Broder’s view, McGartland should have been made a Hero of the Soviet Union while the aged crank should have been Gulag-ed.]

Dr. McGartland, also an economist, declined to comment on the matter. But top officials of the agency said his decision not to forward Dr. Carlin’s comments to the E.P.A. office that would be writing the final report had been his own and not directed by anyone higher up in the agency. [If economist Carlin is not qualified to submit comments, why would economist McGartland be qualified to reject them?]

Adora Andy, the agency’s chief spokeswoman, called the accusation that Dr. Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons “ridiculous.” [Not sure why Broder would include Andy’s unqualified comment here since it is clearly contradicted later in the article by McGartland’s actions.]

“There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,” Ms. Andy said in an e-mail response to questions. “This administration has always welcomed varying scientific points of view, and we received much of it over this process.” [Both statements are false. The endangerment finding was always part of their strategy for coercing Congress and business into CO2 regulation. The Carlin affair debunks the second statement.]

Dr. Carlin said he was concerned less about how he had been treated than about what he described as the agency’s unwillingness to hear the arguments [Arguments = Rantings] of climate change skeptics. He said there was an obvious “imbalance” between the billions of dollars the government had spent building a case for dangerous climate change and the lack of attention to a handful of skeptics [Skeptics = Lunatics] like him.

The affair began in March as the E.P.A. was rushing [It’s OK for the EPA to rush, but not Carlin?] to document the scientific justification for its proposed finding that emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment. The finding was largely an updated version of a similar report, prepared last year under the Bush administration, that came to the same conclusion. But the Bush administration never acted on the research or issued an actual finding. [More Broder sleight-of-hand. Left-leaning, pro-alarmism senior EPA staff reached their conclusion under the Bush administration and, surprise, they haven’t changed their minds, but now work for a sympatico President.]

The agency’s officials were acting in March under severe time constraints to prepare the finding for the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, who was planning to issue it in mid-April, fulfilling a presidential campaign pledge by Barack Obama. [These time constraints are arbitrary and self-imposed.] The finding set the stage for the government to regulate greenhouse gases for the first time, an initiative that will resonate through the economy for decades. [Interesting how Broder says that the finding “will resonate.” But, in fact, this is only a proposed rule. Or is he acknowledging that the fix is in? I thought the EPA spokeswoman said the agency was open to all points of view.]

Dr. Carlin, long known as a skeptic on global warming, was not invited to submit comments on the document. But he was determined that his views be heard. [Skeptics = Bad people. Determination = Boorishness.]

He rushed [OK for EPA, but no one else?] out a 93-page report that cited a variety of sources in raising questions about global warming and the usefulness of government action to combat it. In an accompanying e-mail message to superiors, he said the belief in global warming was “more religion than science” and warned that regulating carbon dioxide would be “the worst mistake that E.P.A. has ever made.”

Agency officials and outside experts who reviewed his report as a result of the outcry over the episode have said they found it wanting in a number of ways. It included unverified information from blog posts, they found, quoted selectively from journal articles, failed to acknowledge contradictory information and may have borrowed passages verbatim from the blog of a well-known climate change doubter. [Sounds like anonymous and ad hominem attacks to me. Is this journalism, John?]

In the interview Thursday, Dr. Carlin admitted that his report had been poorly sourced and written. [Broder implies that Carlin admitted his arguments were wrong. But Carlin is more likley referring to form, rather than to substance.] He blamed the tight deadline.

“There are numerous problems with it,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of sending it to a journal in its current form. It is totally unacceptable for that type of thing. But it was either do it in four and a half days or don’t do it. I had to take some shortcuts.”

According to e-mail messages that were among the documents obtained this week under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. McGartland had earlier tried to discourage Dr. Carlin from filing comments on the proposed finding and told him that whatever he submitted was not likely to affect the final report, implying that the decision had already been made. [McGartland to Carlin: “Our mind is made up. Don’t confuse us with the facts.”] After receiving Dr. Carlin’s comments, Dr. McGartland told him that he would not forward them to the office preparing the final report. [McGartland = McBureaucrat of the Year?]

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round,” he wrote on March 17. “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.” [McGartland to Carlin: “It’s too late to be right.”]

A few minutes later, he instructed Dr. Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.” He also told Dr. Carlin not to discuss climate change with anyone outside his immediate office. [Does Komrade McGartland know that we live in America?]

The e-mail messages most embarrassing to the E.P.A. came to light in late June, when someone sympathetic to Dr. Carlin leaked them to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative group [Conservative = Crackpot] that regularly produces [Produces= Fabricates] studies critical of research that advances a case for climate change and government actions to address it. The institute distributed the material widely, and a number of conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers seized [Seized = Made a mountain out of molehill] on it as an example of what they called Democratic suppression of science. [Everyone knows only Republicans suppress science.]

Dr. McGartland was “counseled” by his superior “to assure that professional differences are expressed in appropriate and considered ways,” according to one of the newly released documents. [Expressed = Suppressed]

Dr. Carlin said he and Dr. McGartland had not spoken to each other since June. [The silent treatment doesn’t sound like workplace retribution to me. I’m sure all EPA employees are now eager to be candid about their views.]

Creepy journalist of the day: John Broder

Check out John Broder’s  ‘hit’ piece on EPA economist Alan Carlin in today’s New York Times. Our comments in bold.

Behind the Furor Over a Climate Change Skeptic
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration. [As far as Broder is concerned, Carlin may just as well not even exist.]

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the surfacing of a few e-mail messages that seemed [Seemed = Didn’t really happen] to show that his contrarian [Contrarian = crazy] views on global warming had been suppressed by his superiors because they were inconvenient to the Obama administration’s climate change policy. Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said [Said = Lied] he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line.

But a closer look at his case and a broader [ Closer and Broader = The facts Broder likes] set of internal E.P.A. documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act paint a more complicated picture. [Complicated = Susceptible to fact-twisting]

It is true that Dr. Carlin’s supervisor refused to accept his comments on a proposed E.P.A. finding, since adopted, that greenhouse gases endangered health and the environment, and that he did so in a dismissive way. [And that’s all there really is to this story.]

But the newly obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, [Skepticism = Clinical insanity] which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit [Small = Obscure and insignificant] where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A. [And haven’t those “outside” scientists been challenged by others?]; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology [What’s Al Gore’s Ph.D in? Oh yeah, he doesn’t have one.]; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change [That’s proof that Carlin doesn’t know anything.]; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, [Keep in mind that we’re talking about an agency that set an arbitrary deadline to declare plant food and human exhalation a hazard to the public welfare.], the EPA’s as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview. [If Carlin indeed used the word “shoddy” to describe his work, I’m sure that it was in an entirely different context than Broder’s use.]

Dr. Carlin remains on the job and free to talk to the news media, [Because the Obama administration is merciful] and since the furor his comments on the finding have been posted on the E.P.A.’s Web site [Posting = Ignoring]. Further, his supervisor, Al McGartland, also a career employee of the agency, received a reprimand in July for the way he had handled Dr. Carlin. [Clearly, in Broder’s view, McGartland should have been made a Hero of the Soviet Union while the aged crank should have been Gulag-ed.]

Dr. McGartland, also an economist, declined to comment on the matter. But top officials of the agency said his decision not to forward Dr. Carlin’s comments to the E.P.A. office that would be writing the final report had been his own and not directed by anyone higher up in the agency. [If economist Carlin is not qualified to submit comments, why would economist McGartland be qualified to reject them?]

Adora Andy, the agency’s chief spokeswoman, called the accusation that Dr. Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons “ridiculous.” [Not sure why Broder would include Andy’s unqualified comment here since it is clearly contradicted later in the article by McGartland’s actions.]

“There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,” Ms. Andy said in an e-mail response to questions. “This administration has always welcomed varying scientific points of view, and we received much of it over this process.” [Both statements are false. The endangerment finding was always part of their strategy for coercing Congress and business into CO2 regulation. The Carlin affair debunks the second statement.]

Dr. Carlin said he was concerned less about how he had been treated than about what he described as the agency’s unwillingness to hear the arguments [Arguments = Rantings] of climate change skeptics. He said there was an obvious “imbalance” between the billions of dollars the government had spent building a case for dangerous climate change and the lack of attention to a handful of skeptics [Skeptics = Lunatics] like him.

The affair began in March as the E.P.A. was rushing [It’s OK for the EPA to rush, but not Carlin?] to document the scientific justification for its proposed finding that emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment. The finding was largely an updated version of a similar report, prepared last year under the Bush administration, that came to the same conclusion. But the Bush administration never acted on the research or issued an actual finding. [More Broder sleight-of-hand. Left-leaning, pro-alarmism senior EPA staff reached their conclusion under the Bush administration and, surprise, they haven’t changed their minds, but now work for a sympatico President.]

The agency’s officials were acting in March under severe time constraints to prepare the finding for the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, who was planning to issue it in mid-April, fulfilling a presidential campaign pledge by Barack Obama. [These time constraints are arbitrary and self-imposed.] The finding set the stage for the government to regulate greenhouse gases for the first time, an initiative that will resonate through the economy for decades. [Interesting how Broder says that the finding “will resonate.” But, in fact, this is only a proposed rule. Or is he acknowledging that the fix is in? I thought the EPA spokeswoman said the agency was open to all points of view.]

Dr. Carlin, long known as a skeptic on global warming, was not invited to submit comments on the document. But he was determined that his views be heard. [Skeptics = Bad people. Determination = Boorishness.]

He rushed [OK for EPA, but no one else?] out a 93-page report that cited a variety of sources in raising questions about global warming and the usefulness of government action to combat it. In an accompanying e-mail message to superiors, he said the belief in global warming was “more religion than science” and warned that regulating carbon dioxide would be “the worst mistake that E.P.A. has ever made.”

Agency officials and outside experts who reviewed his report as a result of the outcry over the episode have said they found it wanting in a number of ways. It included unverified information from blog posts, they found, quoted selectively from journal articles, failed to acknowledge contradictory information and may have borrowed passages verbatim from the blog of a well-known climate change doubter. [Sounds like anonymous and ad hominem attacks to me. Is this journalism, John?]

In the interview Thursday, Dr. Carlin admitted that his report had been poorly sourced and written. [Broder implies that Carlin admitted his arguments were wrong. But Carlin is more likley referring to form, rather than to substance.] He blamed the tight deadline.

“There are numerous problems with it,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of sending it to a journal in its current form. It is totally unacceptable for that type of thing. But it was either do it in four and a half days or don’t do it. I had to take some shortcuts.”

According to e-mail messages that were among the documents obtained this week under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. McGartland had earlier tried to discourage Dr. Carlin from filing comments on the proposed finding and told him that whatever he submitted was not likely to affect the final report, implying that the decision had already been made. [McGartland to Carlin: “Our mind is made up. Don’t confuse us with the facts.”] After receiving Dr. Carlin’s comments, Dr. McGartland told him that he would not forward them to the office preparing the final report. [McGartland = McBureaucrat of the Year?]

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round,” he wrote on March 17. “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.” [McGartland to Carlin: “It’s too late to be right.”]

A few minutes later, he instructed Dr. Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.” He also told Dr. Carlin not to discuss climate change with anyone outside his immediate office. [Does Komrade McGartland know that we live in America?]

The e-mail messages most embarrassing to the E.P.A. came to light in late June, when someone sympathetic to Dr. Carlin leaked them to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative group [Conservative = Crackpot] that regularly produces [Produces= Fabricates] studies critical of research that advances a case for climate change and government actions to address it. The institute distributed the material widely, and a number of conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers seized [Seized = Made a mountain out of molehill] on it as an example of what they called Democratic suppression of science. [Everyone knows only Republicans suppress science.]

Dr. McGartland was “counseled” by his superior “to assure that professional differences are expressed in appropriate and considered ways,” according to one of the newly released documents. [Expressed = Suppressed]

Dr. Carlin said he and Dr. McGartland had not spoken to each other since June. [The silent treatment doesn’t sound like workplace retribution to me. I’m sure all EPA employees are now eager to be candid about their views.]

‘Carbon Criminal’ WANTED Poster Campaign Goes to G-20 Meeting in Pittsburgh

Wanted Poster Alcoa Sketch Final
‘Carbon Criminal’ WANTED Poster Campaign Goes to G-20 Meeting in Pittsburgh

JunkScience warns public to be on look-out for Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, the ‘Carbon Villain’

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — JunkScience.com announced today that it was taking its “Carbon Criminal” WANTED poster advertisement campaign to Pittsburgh for the G-20 economic summit. The campaign will protest the CEO of Pittsburgh-based Alcoa, Klaus Kleinfeld, who is lobbying for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation that will wreck the U.S. economy.

“Klaus Kleinfeld personifies the non-thinking corporate stampede toward economy-killing and environmentally-ineffectual greenhouse gas regulation,” says Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of the Amazon.com Best-selling book “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.”

The purpose of the WANTED poster campaign is to spotlight the CEOs who belong to the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) and who have teamed up with America-hating green groups to lobby for legislation that would make energy dramatically more expensive and that would eviscerate the American dream and standard of living, while not accomplishing anything positive for the environment.

At the G-20 protest, protesters from JunkScience.com will wear sandwich boards featuring the WANTED poster for Klaus Kleinfeld, the “Carbon Villain.”

The Kleinfeld WANTED poster notes that after Alcoa announced the layoff of 15,200 workers in January 2009, it then had the temerity to boast that its “operational excellence” reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 3 percent from 2007 to 2008.

“Kleinfeld cut 15% of his workforce due to the global economic slowdown and then boasts about CO2 emission cuts that amount to avoiding less than 0.005% of atmospheric CO2 accumulation,” observed Milloy. “If I were a CEO that just laid-off that many employees, the last thing I would be doing is touting nonsense in support for policies that would keep those workers unemployed,” Milloy added.

“Alcoa’s profitability depends on U.S.-led and energy-intensive global economic growth,” Milloy said, “but Kleinfeld nevertheless courts disaster by lobbying for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill that will make energy needlessly expensive, sabotage economic recovery, and hamstring future economic expansion — all while doing nothing positive for the environment.”

JunkScience’s WANTED poster campaign kicked off last week by running a poster advertisement of John Rowe, the CEO of USCAP member Exelon Corp., on the Drudge Report in Exelon’s hometown of Chicago. JunkScience continued the Drudge Report campaign this week by running an ad featuring Jim Rogers, CEO of USCAP member Duke Energy, in Duke’s hometown of Charlotte, NC.

“The Senate is about to take up the Waxman-Markey bill in hopes of enacting it before December when President Obama goes to Copenhagen to submit the U.S. to a United Nations-run international cap-and-tax agreement,” Milloy notes.

“But for CEOs like Kleinfeld, America would not be looking down the barrel of the Waxman-Markey gun,” Milloy observed. “If you see one of them,” Milloy warns, “approach with caution and shake your head in disgust.”

The WANTED posters may be viewed at http://www.junkscience.com/Wanted

New York Syndrome?

According to this report in The Guardian, the UN is planning to engage in psychological warfare on heads of state attending the climate summit in New York this week.

The UN plans to separate leaders of developed countries from their staff and then isolate the leaders in discussion groups and lunches with the leaders of poor nations seeking climate handouts, rent-seeking CEOs and green groups.

The ostensible purpose of the planned “shock therapy”, as the UN calls it, is to “imbue” the leaders with a “new sense of purpose” with respect to fighting the much-dreaded global warming.

At face value, the UN apparently aims to generate a sort of Stockholm Syndrome — where hostages develop sympathy for their captors — among leaders of the developed world. But this can’t be true Stockholm Syndrome, of course, since all the developed world leaders are already pretty much in the tank for global warming alarmism and no major psychological shifts will occur.

Rather, the UN seems to hope that this exercise will light a fire under President Obama so that he pushes harder toward the global economic suicide that carbon caps represent. Remember that the goal of an international carbon regime is to hamstring the U.S. economy and to ensnare the U.S. in global governance.

I sense a new Wikipedia entry coming:

New York syndrome is a psychological response hoped for by global warming alarmists, in which a socialist U.S. President is pressured to advocate more intensely for international socialism, regardless of the global-economic-destruction-for-no-environmental-gain that is likely to occur.

Thank you Hank Paulson!

The Treasury Department released today the unredacted documents related to CEI’s recent FOIA request.

The formerly redacted portion of the docs puts the taxes potentially levied by cap-and-trade at an astounding $300 billion per year!

The office that created these docs was created by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, whose nomination we opposed since it was obvious that he would use his position to advance the global warming ball for the greens.

As it turns out, good ol’ Hank may have sowed the seeds of cap-and-trade’s destruction.

Michelle, dumbbell…

… these are words that go together well…

… based on this Dana Milbank-article in today’s Washington Post about Michelle Obama shutting down blocks of Washington, D.C. so that she can pose as shopper of over-priced “organic” groceries at a local market — $5 for a dozen eggs?

Milbank’s article is must-reading if you haven’t already shaken your head in disgust today at the Obama administration.

Unexpected admission from the OECD

ClimateWire reports that a new paper by economists at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that:

… if OECD countries acted alone on climate, containing global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the benchmark expected in Copenhagen — would be impossible.

So even if you believe in the global warming alarmist fairy tale, since India and China have vowed not to cut emissions at the expense of growth, nothing will be achieved by the developed world committing economic hara-kiri over CO2.

ACORN to get cap-and-trade cash in NY

Democratic legislators in New York want to give ACORN part of the $112 million that the state has raised from the sale of carbon allowances through the Northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

ACORN is the “community organizer” enterprise that has been exposed by Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck as little more than a ground-based campaign for socializing America.

According to a report in ClimateWire:

… Groups like ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, would receive some of the $112 million in carbon revenue to train workers in weatherization programs and to enroll residents in the programs.

“The organizations, such as ACORN, that would be eligible to receive this money were strong political supporters of the very same people that were pushing to get the bill passed,” said Mark Hansen, a spokesman for Republican state Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos, who voted against the measure.

Skelos sent a letter yesterday to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo asking him to freeze all state money going to ACORN and its local affiliate, citing the U.S. Senate’s vote on an amendment Monday to deny the group federal housing grants. The vote came after two ACORN employees were videotaped in Baltimore giving tax advice to two actors posing as a pimp and prostitute…

Imagine how much money Democrats would funnel to ACORN if a national cap-and-tax regime is enacted.