Gish Galloping Off The Climate Cliff

PRESENTED BY DIE GROßE LÜGE DER KLIMALEUGNUNG

There are very few practicing climate scientists who are climate deniers, for obvious reasons. The few that are still alive today include evangelical conservatives John Christy¹ and Roy Spencer and oil-industry consultant Judith Curry. And there are a small number of climate deniers with Ph.D.s in other fields, like Canadian evangelical economist Ross McKitrick and BP physicist Steve Koonin.²

For decades, the Republican climate denial machine puffed up these deniers’ influence by having them testify over and over again before Congress.³

The authoritarian Trump regime is no longer concerned by Congressional power, civil society, or public opinion, even as Americans die by fire and flood. So the Trump Department of Energy, which is run by climate denier and fracking executive Chris Wright,⁴ named the five aforementioned deniers the “Climate Working Group” On Tuesday, they published an official climate-denial review.⁵

Their Gish Gallop of denier talking points was then used by EPA Lysenkoist Lee Zeldin to justify rescinding the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants, as he promised months ago to drive a “dagger straight into the heart of climate change religion.” Pending any potential lawsuits or revolution, there will be virtual public hearings on August 19 and 20, and public comment concludes on September 15.

This absurdist triumph of fossil fascism is the latest salvo in a long war between carbon polluters and the public welfare. For decades, the EPA tried to avoid admitting greenhouse gases were a pollutant even though the 1970 Clean Air Act included pollutants that disrupt the climate as the EPA’s responsibility.

In 2007, the Supreme Court finally ruled 5-4 in Massachusetts v EPA that the Clean Air Act was unambiguous and that the EPA had to regulate greenhouse pollution.⁶ The first step in that process was EPA’s endangerment finding in 2009. Then came regulations for motor vehicles in the form of fuel economy standards in 2009-2010 and regulations for power plants and refineries and heavy industry in various forms in 2011, repeatedly litigated and enforced and dropped and enforced and dropped in the ensuing years.⁷

In The Endangerment is Us, former EPA Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice Mustafa Santiago Ali writes:

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1  ExxonMobil tried to install Christy on the U.S. IPCC team in 2001, but the Bush-Cheney administration was unable to be that extreme at the time.

2  Koonin served under Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu as the head of DOE science. Chu’s UC Berkeley project was funded by Koonin’s BP team before they joined the Obama administration. However, Chu was outspoken about the need for climate action, and was muzzled by the Obama White House and then replaced by the fracking-industry ally Ernest Moniz. Koonin outlasted Chu, but left in the wake of the 2011 Deepwater Horizon disaster to join an institute at NYU which now receives BP funding.

3  Christy testified before Congress on 3/29/17, 2/2/16, 12/8/15, 5/13/15, 12/11/13, 9/20/12, 8/1/12, 3/31/11, 3/8/11, 2/25/09, 11/14/07, 3/7/07, 7/27/06, 7/20/06, 5/13/03, 5/2/01, 5/17/00, and 7/10/97; Curry on 3/29/17, 3/22/23, 6/12/19, 3/29/17, 1/16/14, 4/25/13, 11/17/10, 4/26/07, 7/20/06; and Spencer on 7/18/13, 7/22/08, and 3/19/07.

4  Wright’s confirmation was supported by 51 Republican senators as well as Democrats Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Angus King of Maine. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) missed the vote.

5  The “review” is in obvious violation of the Department of Energy information quality guidelines and the Trump Office of Science and Technology Policy “gold standard science” guidance.

6  All five justices of the 2007 majority opinion have left the court. Current justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito dissented. These climate deniers have been joined by Trump picks Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 took care to define greenhouse gases as “air pollutants,” so all we have to worry about is activist judges (lol).

7  Big Ag has managed to avoid regulations just because (its political influence is even greater than Big Oil’s).