Political Climate
Dec 09, 2016
Trump EPA nomination a home run!  Scott Pruitt tapped to reform EPA, admin targets DOE waste

See Willis Eschenbach’s excellent post on The DOE vs. Ugly Reality oN WUWT here.

He starts:

Over at the Washington Post, Chris Mooney and the usual suspects are seriously alarmed by a memo sent out by the Transition Team at the Department of Energy. They describe it in breathless terms in an article entitled “Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings“.  The finest part was this quote from Michael Halpern:

Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, called the memo’s demand that Energy officials identify specific employees “alarming.”

“If the Trump administration is already singling out scientists for doing their jobs, the scientific community is right to be worried about what his administration will do in office. What’s next? Trump administration officials holding up lists of ‘known climatologists’ and urging the public to go after them?”

Halpern asked.

Oh ... you mean like say the Attorneys General of a bunch of states holding up their lists of known “:denier” organizations and tacitly urging the public to go after them? You mean like government officials of a variety of stripes ranting about how “deniers” should be brought to trial or otherwise penalized? You mean like having sites like DeSmogBlog making ugly insinuations and false statements about every known opponent of the climate party line? You mean like Roger Pielke being hounded out of his job by the climate mob?

Mr. Halpern, we have put up with just that treatment you describe for years now. Let me suggest that you take your inchoate fears and do something useful with them - you can think fearfully about how you have treated your scientific opponents for the last decade, and you can hope and pray that they are like me, and they don’t demand the exact same pound of flesh from you.

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Bureaucratic overreach at EPA has been out of control for eight years.

Now there’s a new sheriff coming to town.

Donald Trump has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt for the tough job of reigning in EPA as its new administrator and shifting its focus away from Green dogma back to its core mission of ensuring a clean, safe environment.

As Coral Davenport of the NYT reported:

As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Pruitt has fought environmental regulations - particularly the climate change rules. Although Mr. Obama’s rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt was one of a handful of attorneys general, along with Greg Abbott of Texas, who began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a 28-state lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court.

Predictably, Green campaigners are having a hissy fit.

Pruitt at the helm “is going to be a disaster,” said Earthjustice vice president Lisa Garcia.

“The selection of Attorney General Pruitt, who has consistently questioned climate science and actively fought EPA’s ability to reduce emissions, raises deeply troubling questions,” fretted Sam Adams of the World Resources Institute.

Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer even went so far as to tweet that Pruitt represents “an existential threat to the planet.”

Of course, he’s no such thing.

Scott Pruitt’s principled stands as Oklahoma’s Attorney General against such follies as Obama’s misnamed “Clean Power Plan” and his reasoned skepticism of climate alarmism indicate he knows the difference between radical Green ideology and genuine environmentalism.

Marc Morano explanation at CFACT’s Climate Depot made the Drudge Report:

“President-Elect Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt is a breath of fresh air. No longer do we have to suffer under President Obama’s ridiculous EPA ‘climate’ regulations. It is also refreshing that a Republican President is not throwing the EPA over to the green activists and the media by appointing a weak administrator.”

“Trump’s pick of Pruitt finally means that a Republican President is standing up the green establishment! Historically, EPA chiefs have been among the most pro-regulatory members of past Republican presidents from Nixon through Ford, Reagan and both Bushes. Trump has broken the cycle!”

Keeping the environment clean is vital.  Economy-wrecking regulations and wealth redistribution are counter-productive to that goal.

The sheer panic and harsh criticism emanating from the Left, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, only validates he must be “saying and doing all the right things.”

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See the industry view on the prospects of regaining control of our energy here.

ICECAP NOTE:

We could not agree more. I worked on my doctorate at NYU with an Air resources Doctoral Traineeship grant. We were all environmentalists in the original sense of the word. We had serious pollution of air and water issues. We knew if we would ever get to the point where combustion no longer emitted particulates in large numbers, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and other effluents and only emitted what we all knew were the harmless gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide, we would have cleaned up out air. See former EPA chief Economist and Science Analyst Alan Carlin’s take on CO2 here. Also controlling the dumping of harmful chemical into our water systems would bring them back to life (example Lake Erie once called dead is back). But the EPA staring with a good purpose went astray starting in the Nixon administration and culminating in extreme overreaching regulatory levels under Obama. We have been well under EPS imposed standards for particulates and ozone for years. Pushing extreme unnecessary regulations strangle all industry ($1 trillion) and the cost trickles down to all of us. We look forward to the EPA and Trump eliminating the overreaching regulations. We can have a clean environment and low energy costs that lowers the costs of all goods and services and puts more money in our pockets to spend on the things we need for our families.

Ironically the same environmental fanatics pushing extreme regulatory control of our energy and transportation industries, fight any attempts to build power plants in the third world where many live in the dark without refrigeration and forced to cook over wood or even dung fired fires, condemned to die early from respiratory and other diseases because as SOS Joh Kerry told them, to give them power would just increase the AGW problem. Left unsaid was the other concern of the ECO fringe that we already have an overpopulation problem and giving the poor energy (as we see in India and China now) will just exacerbate it.

image
Enlarged See how the small particulate concentrations nationally have been cut in half and are well well national standards.

See their real motivation here.

See what Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace says about why he left the radicalized movement.



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