Public Suffering ‘Apocalypse Fatigue’ From Climate ‘Cultists’ – EPA’s ‘symbolic’ regs: ‘There is no claim that the [EPA] regulations will affect climate change’

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotJune 12, 2014 1:21 PM with 2 comments

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/climate-cultists_794401.html?page=3

‘There is no claim that the regulations will affect climate change. If anyone bothers to run full compliance with the new regulations through one of the computer climate models, the temperature difference in the year 2100 would be perhaps .02 degrees Celsius. It would be novel if a reporter had the wit to ask the White House how much warming will be prevented in the year 2100 by the full implementation of the new EPA policy, and then sit back and enjoy the tap dancing.

Anyone who seriously thinks climate change is an imminent crisis threatening humanity will scoff at the EPA’s proposed policy, but there has been barely a peep from the climate establishment. Al Gore gave away the game when he used the term “symbolic” to describe the EPA proposal. But the environmental movement is nothing if not persistent and patient. Environmentalists surely hope that once the EPA’s authority is firmly established and the regulations are up and running, a 30 percent reduction can be ratcheted up to 50 percent, then 75 percent, and so forth, reaching 100 percent at some point—all on the authority of the EPA alone. Congress can be completely bypassed. (By the way, the natural gas sector shouldn’t celebrate that the EPA scheme will increase demand for gas-fired electricity because they will be next on the EPA chopping block.)

…The real “deniers” today are the climateers who refuse to consider that their case for catastrophe has weakened even as they promote unserious solutions that do little or nothing to stimulate the genuine energy transition they say they want. Their default position continues to be simpleminded exaggeration or distortion of every possible angle for political gain.

…The rank politicization of the issue and the relentless demonization of any critics within the scientific community are a catastrophe for science and debilitating for serious deliberation about policy. But the left is so far gone into climate madness, and the Democratic party so beholden to its green faction, that they are likely to persist in their inordinate fear of the Keystone pipeline, natural gas fracking, and the extraordinary revival of American oil production, all of which, in a relatively unmolested market, would tend to displace coal. Absent an unusual level of political resolve from Congress, the climate campaign may yet succeed in hobbling the electric power sector in America. That would be a high price to pay for indulging a fanatical movement that in every other respect must be reckoned a pernicious failure.’\