A top EPA official has resigned, supposedly in protest at the direction the Agency has taken under President Trump.
Or — as we climate realists prefer to put it — #winning.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland had worked at the EPA for thirty years. But on Tuesday she resigned from her post as director of science and technology in the Office of Water, claiming “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.”
Just what incredibly good news Southerland’s departure is can be best be appreciated by reading her farewell letter.
It’s supposed to be her Parthian shot — a damning indictment of the decline of a once-great institution under the wicked Donald Trump and his sinister henchman, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
But, actually, it tells you rather more about the weird, reality-denying mindset which prevails among the inhabitants of the swamp which Trump is busily trying to drain.
Here’s the funniest bit:
Today the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth. The truth is there is NO war on coal, there is NO economic crisis caused by environmental protection, and climate change IS caused by man’s activities.
By what definition of “truth” is any of this true?
No war on coal?
But that’s exactly what Obama launched in 2008 when he said:
If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.
And very successful he was too as this chart from the Energy Information Administration shows:
Between 2008 and 2012 the coal industry lost nearly 50,000 jobs.
Only under President Trump has the coal industry begun to recover. But this can’t be what Southerland is talking about when she claims there is “No war on coal.”
No economic crisis caused by environmental protection?
Well, in 2012 it was estimated that EPA regulation cost the U.S. economy $352 billion:
Complying with EPA regulations costs the U.S. economy $353 billion per year — more than 30 times its budget — according to the best available estimate. By way of comparison, that is more than the entire 2011 national GDPs of Denmark ($332 billion) and Thailand ($345 billion).
We know that the annual cost of the global warming industry is — at a conservative estimate — $1.5 trillion.
