Crooked labs, agencies and prosecutors
EPA Nifongs and Beales prosecute US hydrocarbons, jobs, living standards and health
Paul Driessen
Former Durham, NC district attorney
Mike Nifong
was disbarred for withholding evidence from the defense and lying to
the court in the trumped-up Duke lacrosse team rape case. Ex-Boston
crime lab technician
Annie Dookhan
was prosecuted for faking test results and contaminating drug samples,
to get accused dealers convicted. In both cases, charges against their
victims were dismissed or are under review.
So how should we handle federal officials who’ve become unethical researchers and prosecutors
– determined to get convictions, basing their cases on esoteric
circumstantial evidence, allowing tainted and fraudulent evidence,
hiding exculpatory information, rewriting the law, and denying defense
counsel the right to cross-examine adverse witnesses or present their
case?
As the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow explains in its amicus curiae brief
to the US Supreme Court, that’s what Environmental Protection Agency
regulators have been doing with global warming. They’re pulling every
dirty prosecutorial trick in the book, to convict fossil fuels, carbon
dioxide, and America’s economy and living standards of “endangering” the
public welfare.
Since
2009, EPA regulators have shown a single-minded determination to slash
hydrocarbon use, drive up the price of energy, and impose huge costs on
companies, industries and an economy struggling to stay afloat and
retain jobs. They want to control CO2 emissions from vehicles,
electrical generating plants, and eventually the sources of nearly
everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do. The damage to our
livelihoods, liberties, living standards, legal system, health, welfare
and life spans will be enormous.
The
devious dealings have continued under new EPA Administrator Gina
McCarthy, who has pronounced that there is “no more urgent threat to
public health than climate change.” Now it appears the mendacious
malfeasance is even worse than previously thought.
Newly released emails reveal that Ms. McCarthy was “very excited” in 2010 to “finally get the opportunity to work with”
Mr. John Beale,
who for several years was the senior EPA policy advisor helping Ms.
McCarthy and her Office of Air and Radiation develop and implement tough
air quality and climate regulations. When he wasn’t off on one of his
Walter
Mitty undercover CIA capers, that is.
Beale
was just convicted of defrauding taxpayers out of $1 million in
salaries and expenses for extended vacations that he took while claiming
to be a high level intelligence operative. His attorney says he had a
“dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior”
and “manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose
narratives.”
It defies belief to
suppose his dysfunctions and fabrications did not extend to his official
EPA roles of devising agency air pollution and climate policies, then
cherry picking reports and manipulating research to justify them. The
criminal fraud for which Beale will serve 32 months in prison and repay
$1.4 million is outrageous. The fraud on our economy, democracy and
people’s lives is far more costly and despicable. Even worse, their
regulatory fraud is a pervasive problem throughout EPA.
The
Constitution specifies that the Executive Branch has no authority to
engage in lawmaking, but must faithfully execute the laws as written –
and not as regulators might wish the laws had been written, to advance
their preferred policy agendas. EPA has violated these most fundamental
rules, ignoring inconvenient statutory language, and devising and
enforcing other provisions out of whole cloth.
Between 1989 and 2010, Congress considered and rejected some
692 bills
addressing various aspects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate
change. So President Obama’s EPA simply imposed carbon dioxide controls
by executive fiat, using “prevention of significant deterioration” and
“new source performance standards” to create new authority over
coal-fired electrical generating plants. It then unilaterally changed
precise statutory emission standards from 250 tons per year to 100,000
tpy
– to avoid the public backlash that would come if it began regulating
and shutting down all the natural gas generators, refineries, cement
kilns, factories, paper mills, shopping malls, apartment and office
buildings, hospitals, schools and even large homes that emit more than
250 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Those job-killing rules can come
later, when radical environmentalists sue radical regulators, to enforce
the statutory requirement.
In
circumventing Congress, rewriting laws and ignoring the “separation of
powers” doctrine, EPA accomplished an unprecedented power grab over the
energy that fuels our economy and makes our jobs, living standards and
civil rights progress possible. It also flouted clear NEPA, Clean Air
Act and other statutory mandates that EPA protect the health, welfare
and environmental quality of all Americans.
The
agency remains fixated on the speculative impacts of sea levels,
storms, droughts and other manifestations of allegedly “dangerous
manmade climate change.” As CFACT’s amicus brief explains, it completely
ignores the increasingly adverse effects that its boiler MACT, carbon
dioxide
and 1,900 other Obama-era EPA regulations are having on
companies, jobs, families, entire industries and communities – and thus people’s physical, mental and emotional well-being.
As
breadwinners are laid off or reduced to part-time status, families are
unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay bills, rent or
mortgage, buy clothing and medicines, or take vacations. Increasing
numbers of families deplete their savings and are made homeless. Being
unable to find or keep a job erodes self-worth, self-confidence and
psychological well-being. The stress of being unemployed, or
involuntarily holding multiple lower-paying part-time jobs, means
reduced nutrition, sleep deprivation, increased risk of heart attacks
and strokes, higher incidences of depression and alcohol, drug, spousal
and child abuse, more suicides and generally lower life expectancies.
It
means the regulations are far worse than the harms they supposedly
redress. For EPA to ignore this simple reality is illegal and
unconscionable. For it to do so based on fraudulent science is
outrageous.
The
agency’s position hardly reflected genuine climate science in 2009,
when EPA decreed that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare.
Since then, Earth’s temperature and weather events
have refused to cooperate with EPA’s dire predictions. But the agency’s
views and decisions remain etched in stone, leaving the agency on the
extreme fringe of alarmist opinion, insisting that its views are supported by IPCC predictions that are increasingly discredited by Climategate revelations, investigations into IPCC practices, the Beale scandal and even an exhaustive report by one of EPA’s own analysts.
When presented 37-year EPA veteran Alan Carlin’s analysis, his supervisor
tried to suppress the paper and refused to forward it to the EPA group
preparing the final report that would guide the endangerment decision.
The supervisor told him: “The administrator and administration has [sic]
decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help
the legal or policy case for this decision.”
Finally,
even full compliance with EPA’s destructive regulations would achieve
zero benefits, because emissions from China, India and other rapidly
developing countries will continue increasing total atmospheric GHG
levels – and because climate change is driven primarily by natural
forces, not CO2.
For
all these reasons, EPA’s carbon dioxide “endangerment” decision must be
reversed; its stationary source regulations must be scrapped; and the
agency must be required to fully evaluate the consistently adverse
effects of its regulatory edicts on human health, welfare and
environmental quality. If the Supreme Court fails to do so, the House
and Senate must reassert their Constitutional roles.
Otherwise
the United States will steadily fall behind its international
competitors. The health and well-being of Americans will increasingly
suffer. And the Legislative and Judicial Branches will become mere
bystanders to an unelected, unaccountable, agenda-driven Executive
Branch.
_______________
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
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