The WaPo’s lovely palpitations about new EPA head Scott Pruitt
Even jaded conservatives will enjoy the WaPo’s hysterical palpitations just because Scott Pruitt will return the EPA to its original anti-pollution mission.
Just when you think the mainstream media has lost the power to charm, the Washington Post comes out with an article about Scott Pruitt’s statement disputing the Chicken Little certainty that the melting sky is falling and that we’re all going die. The article is so completely over the top, so replete with paranoia and misinformation, and so unintentionally funny that it really made my day.
The humor starts with the headline: “On climate change, Scott Pruitt causes an uproar — and contradicts the EPA’s own website.”
Oh. My. God!!! How can the new boss dare to contradict the almighty edicts from on high contained in a previous administration’s website?
Perhaps you’re thinking that the headline is just a copywriter’s little joke and is unrelated to the article’s content. No. No. Nooo. Please enjoy this breathless paragraph:
On the science of climate change, Pruitt’s statements fly in the face of an international scientific consensus, which has concluded that it is “extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” For that matter, they also contradict the very website of the agency that Pruitt heads. (Emphasis mine.)
That’s some heavy-duty reporting you’ve got there if your scientific authority is to point to a dispute between new management and old. The Progressives really seem to be struggling with the concept Obama announced in 2009: “I won” — the unspoken subtext of which is “I’m the new boss and we do things my way.”
If those Americans, other than a few blue urban archipelagos clustered around America’s coastline, had liked the old boss’s ways, they could have elected Hillary Clinton, who stood ready to walk the same path. But they didn’t. Disgusted by endless Chicken Little hysteria, made cynical by failed predictions and falsified data, and badly hurt when economic resources were sent to green crony capitalists, Americans opted for something different.
The WaPo also seems to be unable to cope intellectually with an important constitutional point that Pruitt made:
“Nowhere in the equation has Congress spoken,” said Pruitt on whether his agency is obligated to regulate carbon dioxide. “The legislative branch has not addressed this issue at all. It’s a very fundamental question to say, ‘Are the tools in the toolbox available to the EPA to address this issue of CO2, as the court had recognized in 2007, with it being a pollutant?’”
The Supreme Court, of course, clouded this constitutional point in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007 when it wandered far from its bailiwick and bestowed a vast new authority upon the EPA to decide whether the world was coming to an end. The reality is that this judgment call has always been and must always be legislative.
It’s laughable to see the WaPo, which once was a reputable paper, even if it did lean Democrat, genuinely confused that a member of the executive branch might think that there are constitutional restraints upon his agency. In this case, the agency is the EPA, which is merely a legislatively created — and defined — subset of the executive branch:
The remarks appeared to fundamentally call into question whether the EPA has a role in the regulation of greenhouse gases that drive global warming, including not only carbon dioxide but methane. Last week, Pruitt’s agency withdrew an agency request to oil and gas companies to report on their equipment and its methane emissions, which could have laid the groundwork for tighter regulations.
The funniest thing about the article is the authors’ (yes, “authors,” as it took two of them to write this steaming pile of ignorance) . . . the authors’ certitude that consensus is the same as science. In WaPo land, there is no solar activity; there are no pauses in the warming; there aren’t any computer simulations that were decisively wrong; there are no laughable predictions about 20 foot increases in the ocean’s level or double-digit temperature increases; and, most significantly, there is no record of fraud. In WaPo land, “hide the decline” is an obscure rock song and NOAA’s temperature manipulations never happened. It’s enough for these intrepid newsmen that everyone who matters agrees.
Looking at what the article wrote, it’s quite easy to re-configure to meet a 14th century version about conventional scientific wisdom (keeping in mind that, even in the 14th century, the smart guys had already figured out from the vanishing horizon that the earth was round, not flat):
On the science of [our flat earth], Pruitt’s statements fly in the face of an international scientific consensus, which has concluded that it is “extremely likely that [if one sails far enough, one will fall off the edge of the earth.]” For that matter, they also contradict the [best prognostications of the king’s prior advisers, into whose shoes Pruitt steps.]
The [prior Royal advisers’ “Flat Earth” scroll states the following:
Recent [disappearances of ships at sea], however, cannot be explained by natural causes alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed [ship disappearances], especially [in the last 50 years, since we started paying attention]. Rather, it is extremely likely that [the earth’s fundamental flatness has] been the dominant cause of [those disappearances].
For this conclusion, the [prior Royal advisers cite] the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on [Earth Flatness], the leading global scientific consensus body that assesses the state of the science roughly every five years.
Actual science requires theses, controlled experiments, data analyses, conclusions, and replication. We have the opposite here.
World bodies, driven by fear, power, wealth aggregation, wealth redistribution and group think, have opted to turn the scientific process on its head. They start with the conclusion, ignore a thesis entirely, run abstract experiments using hypothetical data to predict future events, and then ignore entirely the fact that these allegedly predictive “experiments” fail in every instance to come true.
The one entirely predictable thing about the true believers is that their faith never flags and that they never lessen their efforts to destroy heretics. Former EPA chiefs Lisa Jackson (of the fraudulent emails) and Gina McCarthy both crawled out of their climate-safe hidey-holes to opine about the coming apocalypse.
Amusingly enough, McCarthy opened by stating “The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs.” From there, it’s baseless conclusions all the way down:
“When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high. Preventing the greatest consequences of climate change is imperative to the health and well-being of all of us who call Earth home.”
Oh, and here’s the kicker from someone who professes to be a scientist: “I cannot imagine what additional information the Administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.”
Maybe Pruitt needs more information because he’s alive to the fact that the so-called science community is relentlessly manipulating data and relying on computer predictions that cannot possibly account for all future factors affecting the earth’s climate. He might also appreciate analyses showing that the sun’s cycles closely match past climate data. Correlation, of course, is not the same as causation, but it’s certainly a subject that deserves more exploration than the Leftist wish that Pruitt, having been presented with government-approved fraudulent and failed “scientific” data, should just shut the eff up.
Jackson was equally baseless and conclusory:
“The time for debate on climate change has passed,” Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s first EPA administrator and now vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple, told the Post.
“Certainty is what business needs,” said Jackson. “And relying on science is something that we do every single day. So now if we’re going to question science, I think it has an impact on more than just some federal rules, or some law, it has a huge impact on human health, the environment, and our economy.”
I’ll tell you what has a huge impact on human mental health: This Left’s cynical manipulation of the entire notion of science in order to frighten First World citizens into (a) handing their wealth over to the government so it can redistribute it to friends and use the remainder to buy votes; (b) accepting a return to a second or third world standard of living; and (c) feeling guilty for our extraordinary first world accomplishments, most of which have lifted more people out of poverty and despair than any other forces in history. (Ironically enough, these same scared First World citizens don’t feel one iota of guilt that they’ve caused starvation all over the Third World by taking those people’s food crops for biofuels.)
This Progressive fear-driven hysteria would be laughable were it not for the fact that people aren’t just a little frightened. They’re actually decompensating before our eyes. I wrote yesterday about a friend who is convinced that Trump’s election, which will tamp down activity fruitlessly aimed at preventing natural climate cycles, means that we are a year or two away from a climate Armageddon. I’m sorry for my friend and those like her, and I’m angry at and disgusted by the cynical people who manipulate these fears for their own wealth and power.
The reality is that, in large part thanks to 50 years of Leftist control over education, people are horribly self-centered and ignorant. They’re self-centered because they believe they have the vast power to control the cycles of the solar system. That’s what happens when religion is downgraded and every person is his or her own God.
And they’re ignorant because, when they’re told about the historic temperature record, they’re incapable of understanding that the detailed temperature record on which climate “science” relies goes back about 150 years, when the Victorians with their developing technologies and passion for data started paying attention. Worse, even though it’s been reported more than once over the past few years, they’re ignorant about the fact that NOAA — their own government — has consistently meddled with temperature records to lower temperatures in the early- to mid-20th century, and to raise those from the mid-20th century to the present. Here’s a rule of thumb: If the scientists are faking the data, they’re faking the conclusions too.
And what about the things happening before our very young (and fraudulent) temperature record came into being? Most of the time, it’s anybody’s guess, although we can see large trends. Putting aside the utterly fraudulent hockey stick, those trends show a death-dealing Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. When that started warming, humans began to thrive. After that, there were ups and downs over the millenia, centuries, and even decades.
The Roman Era was a warm one, allowing the Romans to spread out all over the known Western world. The early Middle Ages were something of a retrograde time, as the world got colder and humans retreated from the sophistication of the high classical age. Things got warmer again in the middle Medieval Era, when Greenland was actually green and England could grow grapes for wine. By the 16th century, another mini Ice Age started, freezing the Thames and almost killing the Pilgrims.
Two hundred years later, the climate started warming again, and then cooling, and then warming, etc. Those of us who see the vast tapestry that is human history, or earth’s history sans humans, sneer at ignorant, small-minded people who think all knowledge is bound up in a neatly tied 150-year-old package.
We First World citizens, with the luxuries of wealth and science, have an obligation to minimize pollution, since we must be stewards of the earth for our own and for subsequent generations. To the extent the EPA was formed to meet this moral and practical mandate, I’m all for it. We are not so important, though, that we can change the earth’s natural cycles, and we have no obligation to destroy our world in a fruitless effort to do so.
