Washington, DC26th July 2022 Dear Chairman Carper, Ranking Member Capito, and Members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works: The undersigned organizations and individuals write to express and explain our opposition to the confirmation of Joseph Goffman as Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation in the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Goffman served in the EPA’s Air and Radiation Office during the Obama administration as Senior Counsel 2009-17 and in addition … [Read more...]
EPA’s totalitarian assault on America
Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is clearly on a mission. He has “bold aspirations, and a long to-do list,” says The Washington Post. But to succeed, the Post acknowledges, he must “help the EPA get its groove back.” As Regan put it, “We’ve got a lot of work to do, starting with rebuilding staff morale and getting all our staff back to feeling as if they matter, their voices matter.” Regan says his job is “to restore the scientific integrity … [Read more...]
50th Earth Day: Compassionate concern for humans and their habitat
A measured response to COVID-19 must balance health and economic needs Fifty years of weather have passed since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. This was the same year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established and the federal Clean Air Act was promulgated. Over the past five decades, since I rode my bike to school celebrating that inaugural day, the nation’s air quality has improved markedly. Particle and gaseous pollutants have been reduced tremendously, and … [Read more...]
Ending ‘Sue-and -Settle’ Extortion
Last week, federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive aimed at reducing “sue-and-settle” lawsuits. For those who like voters to have input in the creation of environmental regulation, this is a great move. For decades, environmental advocacy groups have exerted outsized influence—and profited financially—from “friendly” lawsuits against the EPA. These lawsuits have been a conduit for activists inside and outside the EPA to get new regulations in … [Read more...]
Pruitt Sounds Death Knell for Scandalous “Sue-and-Settle” at EPA
One of the reasons the Cornwall Alliance supported President Donald Trump's nomination of Scott Pruitt, at the time Oklahoma Attorney General, as Administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was that Pruitt "publicly opposed the abuse of the court system by use of 'sue-and-settle' to reach sweetheart deals between the EPA and environmental advocacy groups." That was sweet news to anyone familiar with the way Green advocacy groups had abused the legal system, with full … [Read more...]
A Potpourri of Interesting Articles
Just been too busy to write much in the way of blog posts lately, but here are some articles I've thought particularly well worth sharing lately: Falling Sea Level: The Critical Factor in 2016 Great Barrier Reef Bleaching! by Jim Steele. "It is puzzling why the recent 2017 publication in Nature, Global Warming And Recurrent Mass Bleaching Of Corals by Hughes et al. ignored the most critical factor affecting the 2016 severe bleaching along the northern Great Barrier Reef – the regional fall … [Read more...]
Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement
Scant evidence of expected benefit means Scott Pruitt is right Washington Times, Monday, April 17, 2017 Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt appeared on “Fox & Friends” April 13 and said, “Paris is something we really need to look at closely, because it’s something we need to exit, in my opinion.” Why? “It’s a bad deal for America. China and India had no obligations under the agreement until 2030, we front-loaded all of our costs, at the expense of … [Read more...]
Trump’s Rollback of EPA Overreach: What No One is Talking About
President Trump’s actions yesterday (March 28) to rein in the EPA on a number of fronts involves the usual tension between environment and prosperity. Trump has rightly asserted that we can have both a relatively clean environment and prosperity, but this falls on deaf ears in the environmental community. His actions are painted as Republican’s desire to harm your children, because a more polluted environment is claimed to be worse for human health and welfare than achieving a cleaner … [Read more...]
Why Do @Rogues Love Darkness?
In "What The 'Rogue' EPA, NPS and NASA Twitter Accounts Teach Us About The Future Of Social," Kalev Leetaru peers inside the Pandora's box of the implications of "rogue" social media accounts---accounts that purport to express the views of people from within (or recently having left) government agencies, corporations, etc., in opposition to the official views of those agencies, corporations, etc., but the actual authors of which are not revealed. It's a frightening prospect. Before anyone … [Read more...]
Will Trump Administration Be the Death of Science?
Cornwall Alliance Contributing Writer Anthony Sadar, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail, published a great piece in The DC Caller today debunking fears of an anti-science mentality taking over the federal Environmental Protection Agency under Donald Trump's administration. Here's the intro: There is a lot of angst in the air over the future of climate science now that the White House is occupied by a president who has referred to the … [Read more...]
