Thanks.

I don’t believe that the scams are running this EPA effort because, as Jumbo above points out, te scam will eventually be found out and a huge backlash will insue — unless the Governmental structure has changed so much that the backlash won’t matter. The watermelon analogy has a ‘red’ center – and this is the Marxists best chance to take over – through Governmental regulatioin, control of our industries and commerce.

For some reason, Congress has ceded its legislative duties to Administrative agencies. But they could fight back by eliminating the EPA, which has clearly outlived its usefulness.

The CFC story was more amenable to political use for the simple reason that another chemical could be adopted to replace CFCs. This may have cost some moola, but would also not have been hugely expensive either. Once CFCs are banned, no manufacturer has an economic reason to defend them any more. Thus, it was politically easy to take out CFCs and then spread this internationally via the UN and the Montreal Protocol. In political terms, its a conveniently tidy narrative.

One practical problem for those who try to profit from attacking combustion of hydrocarbons yielding CO2 is that electricity is useful and society cannot readily swap it for something else, as with CFCs. Changing the global energy market is enormously costly. This is tempting for chaps like Gore looking to make money for themselves and friends by attacking energy suppliers by claiming they are going to destroy the earth.

But since the earth is NOT going to heat up owing to CO2 levels, the inconvenient truth is the entire plan of attack is ultimately doomed, in political terms. In the long run, claiming CO2 drives global warming has to be revealed to be absurd. Its just a matter of when this will be revealed, not if it will be revealed.

For the farce of CO2 driven Global Warming to have gotten as far as it did must be testimony to:
– abundant funding giving researchers incentive to find something notable lest their efforts be proven to be unimportant
– disparagement of normal skepticism
– using corruption of peer review to exclude balanced views
– the intrinsic weakness of some human beings, even well educated ones like climate scientists, to distort science so as to serve an agenda of their political favorites and to win personal gains
– absolute power corrupts absolutely. Some climate scientists thought they could get away witth twisting data and it would never become known.

However, the point of this post is that their success was ultimately impossible and their scams would ultimately have to come out.

This explains the efforts to “rebrand” the cause. It moved from catastrophic warming to merely the unproveable meaningless idea of “climate change.” And now some are trying to re-invent it further into energy self-sufficiency, toward which the public is reasonably more sympathetic.

Many environmental issues have often rested on political control of the media or biased organizations, like UNEP. In the case of global warming, what has been new in its startling scope, is that the cooking of science enabled control to extend and infect the National Academy of Sciences and leading scientific journals, leading many educated people to assume there was something genuine underlying the Global Warming, science is over, allegations.

Thank you for a well-considered report on the status at EPA. As you’ve pointed out the “finding’s” foundation rests on IPCC which draws heavily on CRU and affiliated studies that appear to have been doctored. A good legal team will be able to demonstrate the shaky foundation the finding rests upon and argue it is far from the proof needed for costly regulation.

I would not be surprised in light of the fast moving Climategate revelations, to see all three of your skeptic options undertaken. It is also likely that as the taint of political scandal grows around CRU and the AGW premise, politicians and prudent agencies will want to distance themselves from the fallout. There could be no greater PR disaster than being saddled with enforcing a regulation widely viewed as corrupt.

Thank you for your service to your country sir.

Thanks for not being an eco-communist watermelon. Its nice there are some honest folks left in government service.

It takes a lot of guts to stand up to the Tidal Wave of liars and dopes.

There is a tremendous amount of weak science that is spewed out of universities. And some Congresspersons respond to the fears or claims of constituents, no matter how ill-founded.

Many people call themselves activists. This suggests they favor a position, just to campaign for something, with little concern as to whether their cause is sensible.

The problems are not just evident within EPA. They are endemic throughout academia. Universities love to grab climate dollars and build their bureaucracies. Journalists often have very little understanding or insight into issues and many will be biased to promote fears.

A positive countervailing force is the Web. The Web allows critics to contribute their viewpoints.

Unfortunately, Mr. Carlin, a fair amount of past EPA “science” regarding chemicals has long been oversimplified, uncertain, or poor. Its good not to be too dismayed by the C02 endangerment finding. Its nonsense, but life goes on and in due course better sense will prevail.