Recently, in conjunction with publication of my new book, Merchants of Despair, which exposes the crimes of the global Malthusian movement, I was interviewed on the radio by a liberal talk show host. When I brought up the issue of race- or caste-targeted forced sterilization programs instituted in Peru, India, and many other Third World countries with USAID and World Bank funds, the host chose to deal with the matter by pooh-poohing the existence of these atrocities.
I was shocked. These programs are not secret, and their horrors have received some, if less-than-deserved, coverage in the mainstream media. Indeed, the members of the Fujimori government were brought to trial and convicted of genocide for their enforcement of such policies. Yet here was this liberal gentleman, supposedly an anti-racist and feminist, a self-proclaimed defender of the poor and the helpless, shrugging off massive violations of human rights and extraordinary crimes directed against women, infants, and people of color. In amazement I blurted out, “This is a holocaust, and you should not be denying it!”
Then it hit me. I was dealing with a holocaust denier.
Indeed, the entire environmentalist movement consists of holocaust deniers, who continue to refuse to look at or admit the existence of the carnage they have created and continue to perpetuate worldwide.
So let’s look at the record.
Some of the worst atrocities can be laid at the feet of the population control ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and his co-thinkers who argued - in direct contradiction to historical fact - that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers. As a result of their agitation, since 1966 U.S. foreign aid and World Bank loans to Third World countries have been made contingent upon those nations implementing population control programs. In consequence, over the past four decades, in scores of countries spanning the globe from India to Peru, tens of millions of women have been rounded up and subjected to involuntary sterilizations or abortions, often under very unsafe conditions, with innumerable victims suffering severe health effects or dying afterwards.
Ehrlich also called for the United States to create a Bureau of Population and Environment which would have the power to issue or deny permits to Americans to have children. While rejected here, this idea was adopted by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were convinced of the necessity of such measures by the writings of the Club of Rome after these were plagiarized and republished in China under the name of one of its top officials. Thus was born China’s infamous “one-child policy,” which has involved not only hundreds of millions of involuntary abortions and forced sterilizations, but infanticide and the killing of “llegal children” on a mass scale.
The anti-technology wing of the antihuman movement also has its share of human extermination to account for. The pesticide DDT was first employed by the U.S. Army to stop a typhus epidemic in Naples which had been created by the retreating Germans through their destruction of that city’s sanitation system. Subsequently, Allied forces used it in all theaters to save millions of diseased-ravaged victims of Axis tyranny, and after the war employed it to wipe out malaria in the American south, southern Europe, and much of south Asia and Latin America. The benefits of these campaigns were unprecedented. As the National Academy of Sciences put it in a 1970 report:
To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.
But the role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone. On the contrary, as Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome put it in his 1990 biography, “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Of course, such reasoning would carry little appeal to the American public. Much better ammunition was provided by Rachel Carson, who in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, had made an eloquent case that DDT was endangering bird populations. This was false. In fact, by eliminating their insect parasites and infection agents, DDT was helping bird numbers to grow significantly. No matter. Using Carson’s book and even more wild writing by Ehrlich (who in a 1969 Ramparts article predicted that pesticides would cause all life in the Earth’s oceans to die by 1979), a massive propaganda campaign was launched to ban DDT.
In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.” No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population control group), chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States. Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.
The harm done by the EPA, itself a creation of the environmental movement, has not been limited to stopping DDT. It is no coincidence that U.S. oil production, which had been growing at a rate of 3 percent per year through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, peaked in 1971, immediately after the EPA’s creation, and has been declining ever since. In 1971, the U.S. produced 9.6 million barrels of oil per day (mpd). Today we are down to 5.6 mpd. Had we continued without environmentalist interference with our previous 3 percent per year growth in the period since - as the rest of the non-OPEC world actually did - we would today be producing 35 mpd, and the world economy would not be groaning under the extremely regressive tax represented by $100 per barrel oil prices. The environmentalist campaign against nuclear power has made its promise for plentiful, cheap electricity impossible as well.
The genocidal effect of such support for energy price-rigging should not be underestimated. Increasing the price of energy increases the price of all other products. It is one thing to pay $100 per barrel for oil in a nation like the USA which has an average income of $45,000 per year. It is quite another to pay it in a Third World country with an average income of $1500 per year. An oil price stiff enough to cause recession in the advanced sector can cause mass starvation among the world’s poor.
European greens also have much horror to account for, notably through their campaign against genetically modified crops. Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World today suffer from nutritional deficiencies resulting from their cereal-dominated diets. This can now readily be rectified by employing genetically enhanced plants, such as golden rice, which is rich in vitamin A. Other genetically modified crops offer protection against iron or other vitamin deficiency diseases, dramatically increased yields, self-fertilization, and drought or insect resistance. But as a result of political pressure from the green parties, the European Union has banned the import of crops from countries that employ such strains, thereby blackmailing many governments into forbidding their use. In consequence, millions of people are being unnecessarily blinded, crippled, starved, or killed every year.
Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history. It is ironic that the perpetrators of this holocaust have chosen to affix the term “deniers” to those who refuse to endorse their proposal to radically expand it via a global program of mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control. In fact it is they, who call upon us to harden our hearts to “the inconvenient truth” that allegedly requires such suffering, who are the real new deniers; deniers not just of a past holocaust that rightfully commands our grief, but a present one, whose desperate victims still plead for our action.
Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of “Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil”. His newest book, “Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism” has just been published by Encounter Books.
See how PSU Ethics Professor Donald Brown and Michael Mann is guilty as charged here. Also Bill Nye the science guy.
I’ve told this story before but it requires repeating because of awareness of climate science corruption. Even skeptics realize claims of incompetence are inadequate. Official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate science was completely orchestrated for a premeditated result. T.R.Wigley’s 1983 paper “The pre-industrial carbon dioxide level” was pivotal in the evolution of climate science corruption. It was a flawed paper that cherry-picked data to claim pre-industrial CO2 level was 270 ppm. G.S. Callendar did the same thing (diagram), as Zbigniew Jaworowski illustrated in a paper to a 2004 US Senate Committee.
There are 90,000 samples from which Callendar selected a few. Notice they also change the slope of the trend, to show a steady rise from 1750.
Results were required to prove the IPCC claim.
“Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.”
Ernst-Georg Beck confirmed Jaworowski’s work.
Modern greenhouse hypothesis is based on the work of G.S. Callendar and C.D. Keeling, following S. Arrhenius, as latterly popularized by the IPCC. Review of available literature raise the question if these authors have systematically discarded a large number of valid technical papers and older atmospheric CO2 determinations because they did not fit their hypothesis? Obviously they use only a few carefully selected values from the older literature, invariably choosing results that are consistent with the hypothesis of an induced rise of CO2 in air caused by the burning of fossil fuel.
Ice cores provide the historic record and Mauna Loa the recent. Both were designed to produce a smooth linking curve of increasing CO2.
Initially, Antarctic ice cores were ‘proof’ of CO2 creating temperature increase and low pre-industrial levels. Then we learned temperature increase preceded CO2 increase and levels were similar to today. The former was widely accepted and contradicted the major assumption of the hypothesis, so recently Shakun et al tried, unsuccessfully, to reassert the claim. The latter claim was contradicted by Jaworowski but essentially ignored.
“The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false.”
In climate science, vehemence of personal attacks are directly proportional to the truth of the claim and qualifications of the author. Jaworowski’s attacks were nasty and unrelenting.
Glaciers, develop when snowfall survives summer melt and layers accumulate. Gradually snow changes to ice from heat and pressure of additional layers. This creates two larger layers divided by the firn-ice transition. On top is the brittle layer where cracks (crevasses) form and below the plastic layer where ice flows and annual layers blend and are deformed. In an understatement Wikipedia says,
“Dating the air with respect to the ice it is trapped in is problematic.”
and
“Trapping depth varies with climatic conditions, so the air-ice age difference could vary between 2500 and 6000 years.”
Dating errors, critical in climate science, occur with different methods.
“Five different dating methods have been used for Vostok cores, with differences such as 300 years at 100 m depth, 600yr at 200 m, 7000yr at 400 m, 5000yr at 800 m, 6000yr at 1600 m, and 5000yr at 1934 m.”
How much climate change occurs in 5- 6000 years?
Other problems with the ice cores include meltwater moving through the ice; Bacteria in the ice releasing gases even in 500,000-year-old ice at great depth; and contamination and losses during drilling and core recovery process. Jaworowski wrote,
“Until 1985, the published CO2 readings from the air bubbles in the pre-industrial ice ranged from 160 to about 700 ppmv, and occasionally even up to 2,450 ppmv. After 1985, high readings disappeared from the publications.”
Beck found,
“Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.”
Here is his plot comparing 19th century readings with ice core and Mauna Loa data.
The ice core record is shown as a smooth curve achieved by eliminating extreme readings and applying a 70 year smoothing average. Eliminating variability is done with the Mauna Loa and all current atmospheric readings, which can vary up to 600 ppm in the course of a day. Information is lost with smoothing. Elimination of high readings prior to smoothing makes loss greater. Statistician William Briggs says you never smooth a time series.
Beck explained that Charles Keeling established Mauna Loa readings using the lowest afternoon measures. Beck notes
“Mauna Loa does not represent the typical atmospheric CO2 on different global locations but is typical only for this volcano at a maritime location in about 4000 m altitude at that latitude.”
Keeling’s son now operates the facility and,
“owns the global monopoly of calibration of all CO2 measurements.”
He’s also co-author of the IPCC reports based on his readings.
Another CO2 measurement provides evidence of smoothing effects and artificially low readings. Stomata, small openings on leaves, vary directly with atmospheric CO2 levels. Stomata records compared with ice core record for a 2000-year period illustrates the issue.
Stomata readings are higher with greater variability as Jaworowski and Beck assert.
Pre-industrial CO2 level was not lower than current levels and both are low in the entire geologic record. Climate models assume pre-industrial levels were lower and CO2 increase causes temperature increase. IPCC predictions are consistently wrong because falsified data and incorrect assumptions produce inaccurate results, but that was their goal.
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See also how Hansen and IPCC projections measure uop relative to other non AGW (CO2 driven) projections here.
Al Gore’s now infamous “Bullsh-” speech is evidence the former U.S. vice president is becoming a raving lunatic, charges a meteorologist who exposes the prime disciple of so-called global warming in a brand-new book.
“He’s clearly becoming mentally unstable,” says Brian Sussman, author of ”Eco-Tyranny."
Sussman, a weather expert turned journalist, cites an August 2011 speech Gore gave in Colorado to a gathering of elites at the Aspen Institute, an address that turned into a wild rant filled with repeated obscenities.
During his address, Gore claimed special interest groups “pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’
“Bullsh-!”
‘It may be sun spots.’
“Bullsh-!”
‘It’s not getting warmer.’
“Bullsh–!”
“It was a gorebasm in which Al totally lost it,” Sussman said, explaining that gorebasms are Al’s pejorative statements directed toward deniers and skeptics of climate change.
“Listening to audiotape of the speech makes it abundantly evident even the Aspen audience was uncomfortable witnessing the ravings of a madman.”
In case someone had been present with a view contrary to his, Gore then intimidated the crowd, blustering:
“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again. They have polluted the sh-. There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!”
Gore continued: “It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the G- damn word ‘climate!’”
Based on Al’s unhinged behavior, Sussman offered some condolences for Gore’s ex-wife, saying, “My heart goes out to you, Tipper. You certainly deserve better than this buffoon. I hope you’ve received a big cut from the divorce. And there is a lot of green - as in cash - to be divided.”
An audio clip of Gore’s obscenity-packed address can be heard here: (WARNING: Profane and obscene language is used).
Gore’s antics are not the only target in ”Eco-Tyranny." President Obama and his agenda are also of top concern.
Sussman claims the environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all. He says it’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government - and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it.
Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism. He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions of acres of land that will be permanently out of reach for entrepreneurs, businessmen and private citizens.
The plan, entitled “Our Vision, Our Values,” notes that 130-140 million acres under BLM management are worthy of consideration as “treasured lands.” Because ecosystems defy “jurisdictional boundaries,” the memo outlines strategies by which the federal government can “rationalize and consolidate” its fragmented landholdings in order to properly “manage-at-scale.” While an ecosystem can simply refer to a single pond or small area, it can also refer to entire geographic regions, thus giving the government an almost unlimited justification to seize private property adjacent to “treasured lands.”
Sussman exposes this is not just theoretical discussion within the White House. The Obama administration is already moving to implement this as policy without consulting Congress by issuing an executive order entitled “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”
The unilateral order explicitly sets as a goal “reconnecting” huge swaths of land under federal ownership, creating large “corridors” compromising millions of acres that will be unavailable for use by private citizens.
Learn about Obama’s diabolical plan to control your life by controlling your environment. Get a copy of ”Eco-Tyranny” today!
Expect this behavior by many of the phonies in the environmental movement as their theory continues to crumble, as temperatures cool, sea levels flatten, ice returns to the arctic, more snow and cold occur in winter, glaviers advance and polar bears thrive. Look foward to seeing the funding for the phony AGW research dry up.
See what Gore has wrought...with brainwashed young choildren who bouight his bullsh… here.
by Joe Kovacs
Al Gore’s now infamous “Bullsh-” speech is evidence the former U.S. vice president is becoming a raving lunatic, charges a meteorologist who exposes the prime disciple of so-called global warming in a brand-new book.
“He’s clearly becoming mentally unstable,” says Brian Sussman, author of ”Eco-Tyranny."
Sussman, a weather expert turned journalist, cites an August 2011 speech Gore gave in Colorado to a gathering of elites at the Aspen Institute, an address that turned into a wild rant filled with repeated obscenities.
During his address, Gore claimed special interest groups “pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’
“Bullsh-!”
‘It may be sun spots.’
“Bullsh-!”
‘It’s not getting warmer.’
“Bullsh–!”
“It was a gorebasm in which Al totally lost it,” Sussman said, explaining that gorebasms are Al’s pejorative statements directed toward deniers and skeptics of climate change.
“Listening to audiotape of the speech makes it abundantly evident even the Aspen audience was uncomfortable witnessing the ravings of a madman.”
In case someone had been present with a view contrary to his, Gore then intimidated the crowd, blustering:
“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again. They have polluted the sh-. There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!”
Gore continued: “It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the G- damn word ‘climate!’”
Based on Al’s unhinged behavior, Sussman offered some condolences for Gore’s ex-wife, saying, “My heart goes out to you, Tipper. You certainly deserve better than this buffoon. I hope you’ve received a big cut from the divorce. And there is a lot of green - as in cash - to be divided.”
An audio clip of Gore’s obscenity-packed address can be heard here: (WARNING: Profane and obscene language is used).
Gore’s antics are not the only target in ”Eco-Tyranny." President Obama and his agenda are also of top concern.
Sussman claims the environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all. He says it’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government - and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it.
Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism. He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions of acres of land that will be permanently out of reach for entrepreneurs, businessmen and private citizens.
The plan, entitled “Our Vision, Our Values,” notes that 130-140 million acres under BLM management are worthy of consideration as “treasured lands.” Because ecosystems defy “jurisdictional boundaries,” the memo outlines strategies by which the federal government can “rationalize and consolidate” its fragmented landholdings in order to properly “manage-at-scale.” While an ecosystem can simply refer to a single pond or small area, it can also refer to entire geographic regions, thus giving the government an almost unlimited justification to seize private property adjacent to “treasured lands.”
Sussman exposes this is not just theoretical discussion within the White House. The Obama administration is already moving to implement this as policy without consulting Congress by issuing an executive order entitled “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”
The unilateral order explicitly sets as a goal “reconnecting” huge swaths of land under federal ownership, creating large “corridors” compromising millions of acres that will be unavailable for use by private citizens.
Learn about Obama’s diabolical plan to control your life by controlling your environment. Get a copy of ”Eco-Tyranny” today!
Expect this behavior by many of the phonies in the environmental movement as their theory continues to crumble, as temperatures cool, sea levels flatten, ice returns to the arctic, more snow and cold occur in winter, glaviers advance and polar bears thrive.
NOTE: A special report featuring Lord Christopher Monckton’s case against a CO2 global warming crisis and the California Cap and Trade taxes was featured on the KUSI News. A more complete interview follows.
I had the opportunity to talk with John at length during the Weather Channel 30th anniversary reunion which I attended (and live blogged) this past weekend in Atlanta (thanks so very much to all of you who helped with travel expenses, it was a true honor for me to be there.). John felt that this story is one that should be covered by every TV station in America, and I agreed. So, as John does, he leads and hopes others follow.
In the video he says this:
The idea that carbon dioxide produced by our fossil fuels threatens the planet Earth - that one seems to have pretty well failed the test of time.
Of course many on the other side of the AGW debate don’t want to accept that, but the fact is that some have come to their senses and climbed down, such as James Lovelock did recently.
This will be up on YouTube for maximum exposure at some point John assures me, until then, please visit the KUSI-TV website here to watch the video.
EPA’s recently announced regulations on mercury from power plants will, in fact, do nothing substantial about the amount of this element in the global atmosphere. If they were really serious, they would ban volcanoes and forest fires, which are much larger sources.
Total annual releases of mercury to the atmosphere from such natural sources are about 5,200 metric tons per year. The world’s volcanoes tend to concentrate along the Pacific Rim, where the great tectonic plates that define the world’s continents are in flux, and in the mid-Atlantic, where continental drift is expanding the Atlantic ocean, opening up huge rifts that extend far beneath the surface. Forest fires tend to take place where there are forests - especially dry ones like those in the western U.S.
Data published in the refereed scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions indicate that the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by human activities - mainly from smelting of metals and combustion of coal - is about 2,320 tons, for a total atmospheric increment (natural + anthropogenerated) of a bit over 7,500 tons per year. The human contribution makes up about 31% of the annual total.
Now it gets good, and we can see how absurd EPA’s perseveration on mercury from U.S. power plants is.
The total contribution from all human activity in the United States to the global mercury flux is approximately 120 tons, or about 1.6% of the total. The amount coming from U.S. coal-fired electricity plants is around 48 tons, 0.6% of the global load. But mercury can reside a long time in the atmosphere - up to two years, so, unless it quickly rains out as “wet deposition”, it’s likely to disperse far, far away. In fact, only about 25% of the mercury emitted by our power plants, or 0.2% of global emissions, falls on our soil.
For that we are going to close 68 power plants supplying electricity to about 22 million homes?
Oh, we know, it’s about the children. So just to show how much we care, we present here the relative magnitudes of the sources of atmospheric mercury in the form of babies:
Figure 1. Comparative size of mercury sources given as the area of each of these babies. The biggest baby - the total global annual flux - is about 153 times bigger than the baby representing U.S. power plants. The fact that mercury can reside as long as two years in the atmosphere is why at least well over half of the mercury deposited here is of foreign origin. The almost invisible dot on the extreme right is the amount coming from power plants that winds up on our soil.
Both the EPA and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) used different models to estimate how much of the mercury deposited in the U.S. comes from power plants, and how much comes from foreign sources. They arrived at even lower numbers than we show here. According to EPRI’s 2006 Issue Briefing on mercury:
Analysis of mercury emissions from U.S. sources, including coal-fired power plants, shows that about 2/3 of this emitted mercury leaves the United States. Most of it is assumed to join the global atmospheric pool. Only about 1/15th of the mercury depositing in the U.S. originates from U.S. power plants, even though they account for nearly 40% of U.S. mercury emissions. Mercury deposition occurring over 70% or more of the U.S. surface area originates in other countries, and is often transported thousands of miles before arriving in the U.S. Thus, reducing domestic power plant sources of mercury will not result in proportional reductions in deposition occurring across the U.S.
The fact that the relative numbers are inconstant across the various sources shows how impossible detecting any effects of mercury emissions reductions will be. Further, there is simply no evidence linking mercury from power plants in the U.S. to any single specific case of illness or death.
The fact of the matter is that, in the near term, natural gas is likely to continue to displace coal for electrical generation as it has now become less costly due to the exploitation of the huge amounts of gas and oil lying beneath the nation’s surface in shale rock deposits. There is little doubt that, if this continues, power companies would gradually switch away from coal as plants aged. Unfortunately, the EPA’s activity accelerates this process, inducing unwanted costs and permanently displacing thousands of Appalachian coal workers, for no detectable mercury-related health effect.
References:
Pirrone, N., et al., 2010. Global mercury emissions to the atmosphere from anthropogenic and natural sources. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, 10, 4719-4752
Electric Power Research Institute, 2006. Sources of Mercury Depositing in the United States. Issue Brief. 3pp
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Note from SEPP TWTW:
EPA: The EPA continues to make outrageous statements. It has been brought to light that in testimony to Congress last September, Administrator Lisa Jackson claimed that further controls of soot would be as beneficial to public health as finding a cure for cancer. There is little question that prolonged exposure to high concentrations of soot cause health problems such as in lungs and eyes. However, already soot in the US is tightly controlled. To equate additional benefits of additional controls with finding a cure for cancer is outrageous.
A senior EPA official described his view of enforcement of oil and gas regulations as similar to the practice of Roman soldiers crucifying natives of a village they just occupied. See this WSJ story on the EPA’s outrageous slash and burn policy.
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EPA’s ‘Crucifixion’ of Energy Sector Exposed
Posted By Rich Trzupek On April 27, 2012 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage
For those of us in industry who have watched the agency grow in power and arrogance over the decades, there wasn’t anything all that surprising about somebody suggesting that the EPA uses threats and intimidation against the regulated community. We all know, from long and bitter experience, that’s how the EPA works. What was remarkable is that it was an EPA official admitting it.
Al Armendariz, EPA Region 6 administrator, was caught on tape urging the troops attending a 2010 meeting to be ruthless in their dogged pursuit of dirty rotten polluters (aka: anybody in the private sector). “You make examples out of people who are in this case not complying with the law...and you hit them as hard as you can,” he said. But it was the spectacularly inappropriate analogy Almenadariz utilized to underline the point that really caught the public’s attention:
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean,” he said. “They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
Yet, as spectacularly inappropriate as that analogy was, it was also dead-on accurate. When the EPA undertakes an enforcement initiative against one industry sector or another, it goes for the jugular. We’e seen it time and time again. The initial “crucifixions” take the form of crushing fines against a handful of supposed bad actors, which serves to send a singular message to the rest of the companies in a particular industry sector: resistance is futile. It doesn’t matter whether the administration in power is Republican or Democrat. It’s an EPA thing. Congress has handed the EPA a tremendous amount of power over the years and the Agency isn’t at all shy about wielding it.
Consider the Clean Air Act, for example. Under the Clean Air Act the EPA has the authority to levy fines of up to $25,000 per day for each violation. Those violations don’t have to (and frequently don’t) have anything to do with emitting more pollutants into the air than are allowed by applicable regulations. If the EPA finds that a company didn’t file the right paperwork at the right time, or failed to keep a required record in exactly the right form, or committed a host of other environmental sins that don’t have anything to do with protecting the environment, they can wield their $25,000 per day per violation cudgel to get what they want. And what they want is revenue, both as an end for its own sake, and as a tangible means to “prove” to enviro-activists and Congress that they are doing their job. As I detailed in my book Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry, the more complex regulations become, the more opportunity the EPA has to pick meaningless nits and jack up enforcement revenue.
It’s all about the price point, as is the case with any protection racket. If the target is a big corporation, you have to load up a lot of alleged violations such that the possible penalty is huge, and then hit them with a settlement offer that makes just a little more fiscal sense than the company deciding to lawyer-up.
The little guys are easier marks. There’s not as much money to be made of course, since one can only squeeze so much juice out of a turnip, but all the Agency has to do is point at the monster settlement it made with the big boys in the target industry and the rest of the peasants are as sure to fall in line as any ancient Turk facing the might of Roman legions.
Need an example? Consider the electric power industry. Starting in 1999 and continuing through present day, the EPA went after coal-fired power plants for allegedly violating certain portions of the Clean Air Act. These complex cases were, in many ways, without real merit in my opinion but it was easier for the big guys to pay what amounted to a tax for daring to operate a coal-fired power plant than engaging in a long, costly legal battle. These cases affected large utilities who operate plants that generate hundreds and thousands of megawatts of electricity.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the little guys - the local co-ops and municipal utilities that operate small power plants that generate a couple dozen or so megawatts per facility. Some of these local players burn coal. The Obama administration doesn’t like coal. And so, like the heavy in 1930s gangster movie, EPA officials have been calling on these small, environmentally insignificant coal-fired power plants and presenting them with a simple choice: shut down or switch to another fuel, because if you don’t we’re going to come after you, and you’ve already seen what we can do to the big guys. It’s like one of Capone’s boys showing up and darkly observing: “nice power plant you got there pal - it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
Almost none of this racket is about actual environmental protection. The United States is one of the most environmentally pristine nations in the world and continues to get cleaner every year. No matter. The more we reduce pollution, the more outrageous EPA enforcement becomes. How can it be otherwise? The Agency, the environmental groups whom it answers to and their leftist supporters in Congress use enforcement activity as the primary metric by which the EPA’s successes and failures are judged. As a result, to bastardize Churchill, never in history have so many been fined so much for so little.
Republican Senator James Inhofe announced that he’s launching an investigation into EPA abuse as a result of Armendariz’s all-too-honest comments. Here’s hoping that something comes of the senator’s efforts. There are a few million of us in the private sector ready, willing and able to bear witness to what has been going on, and the nation will be far better off if Inhofe can help rein in this out-of-control agency.
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EPA Administrator resignation not enough. The entire EPA needs to resign
Washington, D.C. - Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, commented on the resignation of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz in the wake of the release of a video in which Armendariz is caught on tape admitting that EPA’s “general philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of oil and gas companies so that others are “really easy to manage.”
“After his revelation that EPA’s ‘general philosophy’ is to ‘crucify’ oil and gas companies, it was only right for Administrator Armendariz to resign today - but his resignation in no way solves the problem of President Obama and his EPA’s crucifixion philosophy,” Senator Inhofe said. “In his letter to Administrator Jackson, Armendariz again pointed to his ‘poor choice of words’ as the reason for his resignation - but Armendariz was just being honest: his choice of words revealed the truth about the war that EPA has been waging on American energy producers under President Obama.
“We will continue our investigation into the situations surrounding EPA’s apparent crucifixion victims: the American people deserve to know why, in at least three separate cases, EPA tarnished the reputation of companies by accusing them of water contamination; then when the results of their study did not turn out the way they hoped, and they had no definitive evidence to make that link, they quietly walked back their accusations. We will get to the bottom of this - and we will continue looking into EPA’s actions on hydraulic fracturing beyond these three cases as well.
“Especially as Region VI holds some of the most immense oil and gas resources in the country - including in my home state of Oklahoma - I will be watching who President Obama appoints to replace Armendariz very closely.”
