The Trump administration is expected to announce today (Feb. 12) the repeal of a Barack Obama-era determination that climate change poses a threat to public health. Environmental alarmists will doubtless wring their hands and gnash their teeth in derision and faux panic, but gluing their hands to artworks has become passe. More Americans are waking up to the profound failures of the globalist-led plan to reduce planetary carbon dioxide levels.
Climate Change Alarmism Funded Lousy Policies
Following a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gas emissions can be regulated as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, the Obama administration issued an “endangerment finding” in 2009 that became a justification for massive federal subsidies, regulatory favoritism, and tax benefits for “renewable” manufacturing ventures designed to achieve “net-zero carbon.”
The classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant was premised on the Obama administration’s proclamation that “increases in ambient ozone are expected … to increase serious adverse health effects in large population areas,” that rising average temperatures magnify “the likelihood of heat waves,” and that “human-induced climate change may alter extreme weather events.” Despite a cacophony of fearmongering that humanity would cook like frogs in a pot due to innocuous carbon dioxide, the world hasn’t boiled over with heat to match the rhetoric of Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Klaus Schwab, and Co.
Once upon a time, US environmentalism focused on toxic pollutants such as DDT, PCBs, and hydrofluorocarbons. Then Gore launched his “inconvenient truth” premise, shifting the entire planet’s environmental looking glass to an Alice in Wonderland fantasy of carbon-binary obsession. Citing “scientific consensus,” he encouraged the public to believe that an urgent push for “net-zero” carbon through various manufactured goods to replace oil and electricity was the sole battlefront to save the world. Obama’s determination that carbon and other naturally occurring greenhouse gases were the primary climate culprits was used to impose regulations on vehicle emissions and manufacturing and to lavish massive sums on the “renewables” industry.
An Awakening Scientific Consensus
But a new scientific consensus has emerged, understood by Americans without the intervention of “experts.” Carbon is hardly the only bad guy on the planet, and attacking it using the mass production of technologies that inflict observable environmental damage via ecotoxins that (unlike carbon dioxide) cause cancer, infertility, endocrine disruption, and other harms is illogical.
Americans are witnessing the many travesties of the renewables craze firsthand, and the global warming gaslighting is fading in the face of ecosystem harms unrelated to the climate change rubric. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responding to this growing awareness by reversing Obama’s 2009 ozone-heatwave measures in favor of considering the full impacts of renewables manufacturing.
Even if the planet is being warmed by human activity, the industry-enriching, globalist-empowering “whole of government” response has been environmentally rapacious in ways that make a 1995 Ford pick-up truck look relatively harmless. Wind turbines made of fiberglass and plastics spew forever chemicals during manufacturing and pose profound challenges for their eventual disposal. Solar panels manufactured in China depend on large quantities of coal and must be replaced periodically, filling US landfills not with sequestered carbon but with sequestered chemical waste. EV tires wear down 30% to 40% faster than those on gas-powered vehicles, accelerating the ocean and airborne microplastic pollution being deposited into human brains, lungs, and wombs. EVs also depend on lithium mining, which destroys Third World communities and involves unethical labor practices. Lithium battery disposal is an environmental disaster in its own right.
The Fear Scam Exposed
Polls show voters care a lot about environmental causes – until the economy declines. With a much-hyped affordability crisis underway, inflation fueled by rampant “investments” in renewables under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and beef prices still high, Americans are scrutinizing climate alarmists’ claims about the necessity and efficacy of net-carbon technologies. EVs are expensive, even after government subsidies, and they don’t perform well in cold weather. Electricity rates keep rising while the nation’s electric grid is neglected. Solar panel arrays are pushing up land prices for US farmers, displacing food production with fraudulently monikered “solar farms.”
It’s clear that the climate change mantra has proven highly profitable for a few chosen industries at the sacrifice of affordability for most people. Minnesota mandated school buses powered by biodiesel that failed to start in cold weather when the fuel congealed. Vermont’s push for electric buses has provoked national derision over their inoperability in winter and the inability of their highly toxic batteries to be charged in temperatures below 40 degrees. Who knew?
Everyone knows now – though it seems the climate crowd still hasn’t got the reality memo. When the economic, convenience, and environmental costs are weighed, the renewables frenzy that promised carbon rescue has caused far more problems than it has solved. These include health risks to America’s children from forever chemicals, carcinogens, and endocrine disruptors that lurk in the nation’s soils, air, food, and drinking water long after the profit-driven gizmos that created them are disposed of, polluting swollen landfills.
Going forward, the US government will examine proposed climate change solutions more critically. Federal agencies can begin to reverse the environmental damage these technologies have wrought rather than incentivizing their costly proliferation at taxpayer expense. The Trump administration will likely repeal vehicle emissions mandates. Environmentalism that examines total ecotoxin generation rather than the myopic carbon metric is here to stay. That’s the new consensus.
