President Trump struck an amazing blow for science and truth by appointing Scott Pruitt to be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By all accounts, under Mr. Pruitt’s leadership, morale has never been lower among the EPA’s 50,000 federal bureaucrats. This is a good thing for America, because the EPA has been a uniquely bizarre federal entity comprised almost entirely of superstitious tribesmen who belong to a strange weather cult.
The EPA has been that way since its founding in 1970, when many of its members believed earth was on the verge of an imminent Ice Age. (Any second now! Oh, wait, sorry. Now it’s “global warming.”) The biggest rule change to date under the Trump administration has been that the global warming cult’s “secret science” will no longer be allowed for use in setting public policy, which we’ll talk about below.
Anyone who does not believe that the Left has turned global warming support into a religion simply hasn’t been paying attention. The cult of global warming even has its own obviously-plagiarized creation narrative: Adam and Eve lived in a blissful natural world with minimal technology. Then, one day, the serpent (named Capitalism) crept into the garden and tempted Adam and Eve with the coal mine of knowledge of good and evil. They tasted the fruits offered by Capitalism and it led to modern evils like refrigeration, hair spray, cow flatulence, penicillin and the Roseanne reboot.
Because of Adam and Eve’s choice, mankind fell from grace and now Capitalism is running amok, destroying our very atmosphere. Mankind’s future is a hot, hot, hellish doom, complete with rising seas. Fortunately, you can pay an indulgence to the global warming church’s Pope, Al Gore, to have your carbon sins forgiven. Belonging to the cult of global warming is a matter of absolute faith and no amount of scientific evidence will ever turn a believer away from his or her beliefs.
Scott Pruitt, as Attorney General for the state of Oklahoma, described himself as an advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda. Good for him! The superstitious bureaucrats at the EPA must be practically having kittens every time Pruitt walks into the building!
Just look at some of the amazing America-First items that have been implemented since Pruitt took the helm. Obama’s EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, had the agency rewrite the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule in 2015 into a land grab that would have made Josef Stalin proud. WOTUS is a rule that is used to legally define which territorial waters belong to the United States, according to the EPA and the US Army.
McCarthy and Obama rewrote WOTUS so that if it rained and mud puddles formed in your driveway, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers could come in seize your property, slap you with a fine and engage in other bureaucratic intrusiveness to the umpteenth degree. Imagine how Hillary Clinton could have put that rule to use in Wyoming and other states that voted against her. Fortunately, Pruitt zapped that rule.
Stephen Milloy, who blogs at a wonderful website called Junk Science, points out another great Pruitt-ism at the EPA. The EPA has all sorts of boards where scientists and researchers gather and give each other grants to study global warming.
In one example highlighted by Milloy, a 26-member board had 24 board members who had been awarded a collective $200 million in taxpayer-funded grants, which were awarded to them by the very board they were sitting on. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, and the stupid taxpayers will be none the wiser!
Pruitt changed the rule so that now if you want to receive a grant, you cannot sit on a board, and vice versa. Suddenly nobody wants to sit on a board, but the boards are not giving out grants the way they used to. It’s funny how the draft dries up immediately when a little sunlight shines through.
Most recently, Pruitt has banned the use of secret science to set public policy. The most expensive EPA regulations on the books, related to air quality, are all based on a scientific study conducted by Brigham Young University and Harvard University in the early 1990s.
If you would like to read that study, you’re out of luck. It is locked away in a vault somewhere, presumably next to the Kennedy assassination documents, Barack Obama’s paper birth certificate and college transcripts, and other documents which the American people are never allowed to see with their own eyes.
An outside scientific agency requested the EPA’s secret science study in 1994 but was rejected. Congress asked for the data in 1997 and was rejected. Congress asked again in 2011 and was rejected. Congress finally subpoenaed the EPA’s secret science in 2013, but like all other subpoenas issued to the Obama administration, it was ignored.
It’s been almost 30 years now and the American taxpayers have never been allowed to see the science that the EPA’s most costly rules are based on. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that compliance, regulation and intervention from the EPA sucks almost $400 billion per year out of the American economy (at least, it did before President Trump came to town). And it’s all based on secret science.
This is like forcing Americans to pay a unicorn tax. May we please see the unicorn, pretty please? “No, the unicorn is a secret. Now pay the tax!”
Now that President Trump has nuked the secret science rule at the EPA, the global warming cultists are predicting the apocalypse, complete with “increased lung damage and premature death,” according to some of the acolytes. Keep in mind that Trump and EPA Director Pruitt hasn’t changed any rules related to air quality.
He’s just saying we should be allowed to see the scientific studies that public policy is based on — and that is what has the cultists alarmed. Our question is, once we do see the science and it does not prove what they claim that it proved for 30 years… can we get our money back?
