Pruitt Will Be a Game Changer at EPA

Written by Daniel John Sobieski

Personnel is policy, as they say, and despite his meeting with the High Priest of Climatology, Al Gore, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be the new head at EPA, shows Trump is serious about pulling back the curtain to expose climate fraud, leaving climate zealots as unsettled as the alleged “science” they trumpet.

Pruitt has already fought the various unconstitutional power grabs that essentially established it as the fourth and unelected branch of government. As Tom Borelli notes in Conservative Review:

Pruitt’s concerns of EPA overreach also includes the agency’s controversial, “Waters of the U.S.” rule that significantly expanded the federal government’s regulatory reach to include ditches on private land. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to address the regulation that he called one of the “most intrusive rules” and Pruitt could execute the new president’s goal to neuter its impact.

Every puddle in America, every creek running through a farm or ranch would become subject to regulation by the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Pruitt has set dead aim on this and other EPA abuses.

In an article in National Review, coauthored with fellow attorney general of Alabama, Luther Strange, Pruitt opined that climate science isn’t settled and should be subject to a vigorous debate. He argued that EPA dictates are no different than the tyranny America rebelled against in its founding, and that EPA has no justification to bypass the will of the people as expressed through its elected representatives:

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product…..

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.

It is the tyranny of the EPA that Pruitt seeks to overthrow. The EPA is the poster child for dictatorship by regulation and its reform is key to President-elect Trump’s agenda of job growth and energy independence. There is no justification for EPA’s draconian dictates. As Investor’s Business Daily noted:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says global climate change caused by carbon pollution “is one of the most significant public health threats of our time,” thus forcing her agency to adopt stringent measures. Yet carbon emissions are declining while temperatures are not rising. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Oct. 21 released data showing energy-related carbon dioxide emissions declined by 3.8% in 2012.

And according to the EPA, emissions from power plants declined by 10%. CO2 emissions in the U.S. have actually declined by 12% since 2007… while average global temperatures have been flat since 1998. Part of that is due to competition from increasingly abundant natural gas made so by improvements in an energy technology known as hydraulic fracturing.

The EIA notes the country saw an “overall decline” in power generation from renewable sources, but “the carbon intensity of power generation still fell by 3.5%, due largely to the increase in the share of natural gas generation relative to coal generation.”

Climate change and global warming hype is nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:

Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons….

Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.

“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”

The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat. The scientific record, as IBD notes, shows that climate change is a scam:

…a paper published recently in the journal Global Environmental Change found that carbon dioxide emissions are essentially self-regulating and that after countries reach a higher GDP level, CO2 emissions either stabilize or even decline, without the need for carbon taxes or carbon capture technology.

Here in the U.S., the fracking revolution has released from our vast shale formations vast natural-gas deposits that have done more to reduce carbon emissions than any IPCC report.

A study published late last year by the Energy Information Administration reported that the “carbon intensity” of the electricity produced in the U.S. actually fell by 13% from 2007 to 2012.

British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton recently pointed out at Marc Morano’s Climate Depot that the “Great Pause” in global temperatures — now at 18 years and counting — has occurred even as carbon dioxide concentrations have risen.

This 18-year period constitutes roughly half the satellite observation period that began in 1979.

Physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute notes that the warming pause since 1997 has occurred while atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased 25%.

“CO2 is responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring … and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring,” he states.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but the source of all plant and animal life. Even if emissions were a threat, and they are not, it’s prosperity and the technology that comes with it, such as fracking, that reduce overall emissions in the atmosphere.

And now the high priests of the global warming religion are demanding what other false religions have demanded — human sacrifices upon their altar. Pruitt is the right man to expose climate fraud and end the job and freedom-killing actions of the EPA.

Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the ChicagoSun-Times among other publications.

This article was originally posted at AmericanThinker.com