American Elephants

The newly confirmed chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy wasted no time in taking on the opponents of the administration plan to “crack down of global warming pollution.” She chose the friendly venue of an audience at Harvard Law School, and told them that “curbing climate-altering pollution will spark business innovation, grow jobs and strengthen the economy.” That’s a pretty batch of ridiculously unprovable claims, which she followed up by saying “Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs? Please, at least for today?”

“Lets talk about this as an opportunity of a lifetime, because there are too many lifetimes at stake.” Oh please. 

The EPA bolsters their case with drastic claims of all the people who will die if we don’t eliminate the particular kind of pollution Ms. McCarthy is pushing on any particular day. The EPA has gotten away with improbable claims about future deaths from whatever pollutant the EPA wants to ban. Their unfounded regulations have been one of the most effective job killers of the past five years.

Carbon is not a pollutant, but one of the building blocks of life. We are carbon life forms. If we were to eliminate carbon from out atmosphere, we would eliminate all life.

Those seeking to strangle the world economy by denying it access to carbon, have invented a concept called “the social cost of carbon.” According to this notion, the use of carbon imposes a cost on society through global warming, and therefore regulations to restrict the use of carbon create benefits that can be measured in dollar terms. Pursuant to this strategy, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 hired a crowd of consultants to generate estimates that would be useful for the cause. This they dutifully did, producing a set of very precise computer calculations of the cost of carbon — ranging from $11 to $221 per ton of carbon dioxide — which were assembled into an interagency report sent to the White House in May 2013.

No doubt gratified by the freedom of choice thus provided, the Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget picked a number, and proceeded to set the social cost at $38 per ton of carbon dioxide, or $139.33 per ton of carbon, so that henceforth federal regulators could use that figure to demonstrate the economic value of their restrictions.

At this point these charlatans should be laughed out of the Beltway. The calculations are completely fake, produced with computer models (GIGO), imaginary data, and arbitrary assumptions. There is real data that refutes their political power grab.

Just in the past 55 years — well within living memory —in line with a fourfold increase in carbon use, the average global GDP per capita has quadrupled. That is an economic miracle that has lifted billions of people out of hopeless poverty.

To claim that this came at a comparable “social cost,” one would have to show that there has been a climatic catastrophe. Has there? How much better was the weather in the 1950s than it is today?… Not at all. There was no climatic social cost to the carbon-driven miracle of the 20th century.

Oddly enough, as the EPA moves forward with some of the most costly regulations in history, they have been unwilling to reveal to the American people the data they use to justify their multibillion dollar regulatory agenda. Their new regulation would cost upwards of $90 billion a year, but you are supposed to take their science on faith. They care about the planet, they wouldn’t lie, would they?

The House Committee on Science and Technology has voted to subpoena the EPA for data from key studies used to justify air pollution regulations. They lost me when they claimed a quite specific number of asthmatic children who would die from carbon pollution in the air. First, you cannot predict the future, you can only guess. Second, the medical profession does not know what causes asthma.

The House of Representatives voted in favor of an amendment that would make it more difficult for the EPA to regulate without congressional approval. The bill passed on Thursday with bipartisan support. The EPA continues to propose rules, that by their own estimates are the most costly in history, yet the benefits of these rules seem to depend on “secret science.”