Reversing the EPA’s Endangerment Finding Won’t Stop the ‘Green’ Agenda in Your Town

If science is to act usefully as a public good, it is as a reality check on political and social folly. Crafting a sound energy policy, for example, should be informed by the laws of thermodynamics and Maxwell’s equations. For roughly the past three decades, however, our political custodians have been crafting energy policy around something like phlogiston, that mythical “fire substance” that alchemists said permeates all matter. Thus, we have the phantasmagorical dreams of windmills, solar panels, rainbows, and flowers actually being taken seriously among alarmingly large swathes of policymakers, politicians, cultural elites, and a compliant public. In this determined pursuit of folly, great expense and effort have been expended to cultivate an army of scientific apologists who were prepared to argue that, you know, maybe there’s something to this phlogiston thing after all.

This determined pursuit of phlogiston folly was justified by its own golden tablets myth, the so-called greenhouse gas endangerment finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), issued in 2009. So began one of the greatest scientific betrayals of public trust of all time. In 209 pages of impressive tables, graphs, and computer projections, this bureaucratic doorstop outlined the dire consequences that would follow if the government did not seize total control of the world’s energy economy. Here’s a partial list:

• People would die.
• Infectious and parasitic diseases would rise.
• Heat waves would wipe out the chronically sick and very young.
• Cold waves would polish off the remainder.
• There would be more storms, floods, and droughts.
• Forests would be wiped out by fires and insect pests.
• Asthma would spread.
• Crops will fail, and famine will ensue.
• Weeds would spread.
• Livestock would be decimated.
• Water scarcity would worsen.
• Fisheries would collapse.
• Sea levels would rise.
• Energy production would decline.
• Nuclear power plants would melt.
• Island nations would sink like Atlantis beneath the rising waves.
• Vulnerable ecosystems would collapse.
• Birds would be deprived of nests.
• Butterflies would be no more.
• Oceans would become acidic baths that would dissolve coral reefs.
• Polar bears would starve and die.
• Indian tribes would be hardest hit.