PrintNovember 7, 2010
The EPA's 'Climate Change' Tyranny
In post-Climategate America, people are beginning to appreciate the magnitude of scientific and political trickery that spawned the global warming scare. With the hoax exposed, backdoor methods are being used to control Americans' lives using "climate change" doctrine. Warmists no longer look to the shock and awe of cap and trade. They'll use the EPA.
Implementing destructive policies comes naturally to a president and Congress that forced governmental health care and financial-sector takeovers on the American people. But the president hasn't deployed the third weapon in his prosperity-killing arsenal: energy policy "reform." Obama's behavior so far suggests that he wouldn't hesitate to destroy the economy to force America to "go green." With cap and trade dead, totalitarian regulation is Obama's best chance to jam greenness down Americans' throats.
Renewable Electricity Standards illustrate how junk-science-based environmental laws might be passed in the "chunks" that Obama prescribes. RES would breed EPA regulations that manipulate consumers into buying what they don't need and can't afford: "green" electricity. Data from the president's own Energy Information Administration show that panaceas like wind and solar power are lies. A Heritage Foundation analysis exposes the betrayal hiding within green dreams (2016 prices in 2008 dollars per megawatt-hour).
- Conventional coal power: $78.10
- Onshore wind: $149.30
- Offshore wind: $191.10
- Thermal solar: $256.60
- Photo-voltaic solar: $396.10
Wind and especially solar power are economically ruinous fantasies. Furthermore, even if proliferated, wind and solar will have zero impact on global temperatures. Physics simply doesn't lie. People lie. And if Obama's EPA people continue the treachery of burdening coal- and gas-generated power producers to make wind and solar look attractive, then energy costs will "skyrocket," as Obama promised. Americans will suffer dwindling prosperity. Mother Nature will have a good chuckle.
Kathleen Hartnett White of the Texas Public Policy Foundation warns that the "number of recent EPA actions is staggering." Measures such as new ozone standards and "greenhouse-gas" regulations will send manufacturing overseas, as Kyoto emission targets do in Europe. White criticizes the EPA strike-down of a Texas program which, for sixteen years, left room for profits to fund job growth while reducing emissions across more than 120 industries.
The EPA exudes contempt for profits. As Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis observes, the agency may resort to laws like the Endangered Species Act to enact "draconian" regulations despite "very large burdens those [regulations] would impose on the U.S. economy." EPA policy in a nutshell: save the planet, impoverish the humans.
The agency speaks out of opposite sides of its mouth. Administrator Lisa Jackson promotes an "environmental justice" agenda to allegedly help poor minorities. Yet her organization's dogma-driven policies will destroy jobs that would actually help poor minorities.
As the EPA enacts overregulation that will pummel industry, Spain is already grappling with the aftermath of similar foolishness. American investors hoodwinked by preachers of green dreams are going to get screwed, as did Spain's solar power investors, whose returns will evaporate when the Zapatero government ends subsidies. With cost premiums 200 to 400 percent over coal-fired electricity (Heritage Foundation numbers above), disappearing subsidies mean disintegrating markets, companies, and jobs.
But not Spain, Climategate, California's green debacle, or honest science can dissuade environmentalists from acting on feel-good, do-bad dogma. Shrieks of "unprecedented warming" continue. In one instance, warmists whine about a fifty-year, two-degree, "human-caused" rise in temperatures on the western Antarctic Peninsula. But the whiners ignore the findings of researchers who actually studied the phenomenon.
Materials removed by scientists from the peninsula's previously glaciated surface contain moss, peat, and shells -- evidence of once-living plants and sea creatures. The samples date to between 700 and 970 years ago and at least two earlier periods. Conclusion? Currently ice-free terrain was ice-free no fewer than three times before now.
What, then, does it mean when warmists blame machine-belched CO2 for "unprecedented warming" despite evidence for equivalent warming centuries before the machines existed? It means that Gaia is crying wolf. It means that the academic-corporate complex that profits from preaching myths is still preaching away.
Dogmatists preach for dogmatic reasons. Howls of "unprecedented warming" are aimed at convincing us humans to curb our industrial enthusiasm.
Yet not a single howl has withstood scrutiny. Furthermore, humans have dealt with temperature swings larger than those of the last 150 years. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period (tenth to fourteenth centuries) enticed Vikings to populate Iceland and Greenland. The Vikes left the settlements by 1450 when the weather turned unbearably cold at the onset of the Little Ice Age (mid-fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries). Deciding that "cosmological disorder" causes frigid temperatures, the Vikings built churches. In contrast, the Inuit people adapted to the Little Ice Age and still live in the Arctic today.
Viking climate theory has found fresh adherents -- warmists. The Vikes imagined spiritual chaos and built churches. Warmists imagine industrial diabolism and push the doctrine of the Church of Global Warming -- parent organization to the Church of the Green Dragon. Rather than adapt, the Vikings quit. Warmists wouldn't dream of adapting. They want to sacrifice capitalists. Warmist religious doctrine demands that humankind revert to simpler times, before evil technology.
Religious Studies Professor Bart Ehrman notes that a doctrinal "argument's rhetorical force should never be confused with the practical realities compromising its logic ... "[1]. The professor's point is astonishingly relevant to how the Church of Global Warming pushes illogical doctrine that ignores "practical realities" -- realities like unearthed plant remnants indicating temperatures high enough to shrink glaciers centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
Ehrman points out that religionists have pushed believers to embrace "the authority of church officials ('Obey the bishop!') without going into the content of the disputes, on the assumption that if the right people are in charge, they will know what to do." Pope Al used to be one of the "right people." Labeling global warming skeptics "no better than Holocaust deniers" still substitutes for "going into the content of the disputes."
To resolve disputes, religious authorities invoke religious authority, not evidence. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch at the start of the second century, dispensed the sort of advice offered two millennia later by warmists: "Pay attention to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons [2]!" Pope Al's inspiration probably came from the Norse goddess Hlin, who protects men, consoles grieving mortals, and kisses away their tears. Gore needs consoling even now, ten years after the bad time. Rumor has it that in order to avoid irate female massage therapists, he is holed up in the Dragon's lair alongside environmental regulators frocked in green robes.
Pope Al anxiously waits for goddess girl's lips to caress his tear-drenched cheeks.
A writer, physicist, and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér invites you to visit his website, www.chuckroger.com. E-mail Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com.
[1] Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths we Never Knew, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 143.
