Looks like the great climate-change unraveling came none too soon.
Three states last week filed papers challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s scheme to use global-warming fears to seize sweeping power over much of the US economy.
Officials in Texas, Virginia and Alabama charge that recent revelations challenging the scientific “consensus” that humans are causing catastrophic warming also undermine the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gasses as a pollutant — which would give it inordinate power over nearly every industry in the country.
But what about that warming? Certainly, it hasn’t been a good few months for climate alarmists.
Among the recent revelations:
* Leaked e-mails in December showed that climate scientists at Britain’s formerly prestigious Climate Research Unit conspired to hide inconvenient data while attempting to intimidate warming skeptics.
* A key finding of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 along with Al Gore — was revealed last month to be utterly bogus.
The IPCC had claimed, with no evidence beyond a citation from a mass-market science magazine, that global warming would cause Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035.
* Then, this month, CRU director Phil Jones admitted that temperatures in the Middle Ages may have been even higher than they are today; for technical reasons, this was a huge blow to the alarmists’ case. And Jones also confessed that there’s been no statistically significant warming in the past 15 years.
Alarmists have been reduced to arguing that drastic steps should be taken to curtail carbon emissions just in case climate change is as bad as they say.
But such an argument completely ignores the costs of such a move — which the EPA is dead set on imposing.
Giving the agency power over carbon would subject factories, farms and even large apartment buildings to onerous new red tape — and raise the prospect of the agency shutting some of them down entirely.
Bye-bye, economic recovery.
Not that the EPA cares about whether or not there’s a “consensus.” The agency’s ruling would essentially impose by fiat the cap-and-trade tax that President Obama couldn’t get through Congress.
All that matters is its own power.
Here’s hoping it can be checked — before it’s too late.