The Climate-Industrial Complex Finally Gets Their Man

After an unprecedented, even for Washington, attempt to smear Scott Pruitt for the purpose of forcing President Trump to ask for his resignation, the Climate-Industrial Complex (CIC)finally got President Trump today to accept the resignation of Pruitt, his Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The resources devoted to this effort by the CIC were far beyond anything I have ever seen over many years. The CIC apparently decided some months ago that if they could not prevail in the court of public opinion that their best course of action was to smear Pruitt for any and all alleged sins during his tenure in office. It worked. This is still another example of the CIC’s always sleazy tactics–only much lower than usual even for the CIC.

Did I support Pruitt fully? Of course not. But his major errors were those of being too soft on the CIC. Specifically, he failed to confront the Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding (EF) head-on, without which the CIC would be able to stop most efforts to reduce EPA’s efforts against climate alarmism. Without confronting and winning the fight over the EF a new climate alarmist administration could reverse all of their climate regulatory reductions overnight, thus undermining Trump’s efforts to scale back the potentially disastrous EPA climate regulations. The CIC did something somewhat similar (but unrelated to climate, of course), under the Reagan Administration–and it worked then too.

The Acting Administrator will apparently be Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist working for Robert Murray, the President of a coal company and a very strong skeptic with a good understanding of the climate scam. Unfortunately, shortly before he resigned Pruittdecided to regulate CO₂ by actions within the fence lines of electric power plants. This makes no sense at all since it depends on the CIC’s bad science claiming that increases in CO₂ will have a significant effect on global temperatures. The advantage of this approach to politicians is that it does not require an open fight over the so-called science used by the CIC. But it leaves the door wide open to climate alarmists to keep the scam going or even strengthen it if more sympathetic politicians should regain power. These last one and half years offered a golden opportunity to end the scam once and forever. Pruitt and perhaps Trump appear to have missed this opportunity. The scam will now live to fight another day rather than suffering the defeat it so richly deserves and the nation needs.