Green Notes, July 2016: Portland Resolution on Climate Change, Almost-Impossible-to-Fire Employees at the EPA

Green Notes is part of Green Watch. For the full PDF, click here.

A supposed “scientific consensus” was used to promote slavery, white supremacy, and eugenic practices such as the involuntary sterilization of poor Southerners (authorized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell). Prohibition, the nation-wide ban on alcohol, was justified on the ground that, according to scientists, alcohol was the most addictive substance on earth, and consuming it could make a person spontaneously combust in blue flame. Now the ignorant and the greedy are using a (non-existent, in this case) scientific consensus to force the rest of society to accept their claims on Global Warming. One recent example: The school board in Portland unanimously approved a resolution banning books and other materials that “deny” or cast doubt on Warming theory.

What does it mean to “cast doubt”? Bill Bigelow, a leading proponent of the ban, cited, as an example of improper doubt, the following passage in the textbook Physical Science: “Carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, power plants and other sources, may contribute to global warming.” You might think that that language would satisfy a Warmer, but no: Words like “might,” “could,” or “may” introduce an unacceptable level of doubt, according to Bigelow. By the way, Bigelow is coauthor of the textbook A People’s Curriculum for the Earth, which presumably would pass muster under the new rules.

The Portland resolution, introduced by board member Mike Rosen (who leads the NW Ecoliteracy Collaborative), directed school staff to plan for offering “curriculum and educational opportunities that address climate change and climate justice.” What is “climate justice,” which all kids in the Portland public schools will now be required to study? Type “climate justice” into Google, and Google helpfully provides this definition: “Climate Justice is working at the intersections of environmental degradation and the racial, social, and economic inequities it perpetuates.” The website Peaceful Uprising, from which Google takes its definition of the term, adds that “climate justice” requires the U.S. to allow unregulated immigration: “To feed the US growth machine, once agricultural self-reliant economies are decimated, their resources depleted, forcing many to migrate from their home. Some of these ‘corporate refugees’ come to the US looking for a better future for their children. And yet, when the economy tanks, our leaders pave the way for these migrants to be scapegoated and blamed for ‘stealing people’s jobs.”‘

Anti-scientific claims about Global Warming have always been about “climate justice.” As noted in 2010 by Ottmar Eden­hofer—co-chair of Working Group III of the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, professor of the Eco­nomics of Climate Change at the Technical University of Berlin, and deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research—”one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”

The terrorist-supporting Palestinian Authority became the 197th party to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the principal international body promoting Global Warming beliefs. (See the April 2016 Green Watch for more on lslamofascists‘ support for Warmism.) As noted by Brett Schaefer and Steven Groves in the Daily Signal, the Palestinian admission represents a problem for the Obama administration. The administration asked Congress for $13 million for the UNFCCC for 2017, and is seeking much, much more for the UNFCCC-sponsored Green Climate Fund. But the law contains two restrictions that prohibit U.S. taxpayers’ money from going to organizations that include the Pales­tinians. Cutting off the UNFCCC would not be without precedent: The U.S. government cut off UNESCO for this reason in 2011.

When the Environmental Protection Agency uncovered a child molester among its employees, the agency punished him by paying him $55,000 to retire. According to Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation, the employee was a registered sex offender (for “indecent acts with a minor”) and had been caught twice with emergency lights illegally installed on his vehicle and once with fake badges to impersonate law enforcement, which violated his probation. EPA fired him for the probation violation, but the Merit Systems Protection Board reinstated him, leading to the settlement. Other cases of almost-impossible-to-fire employees, recently exposed by the House Oversight Committee, included an employee who remains on the job despite stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of office equipment, and an EPA contractor who watched pornography on the job for an hour or two each day for 18 years before being fired. Another employee who watched porn regularly at work was punished with a five-day suspension, a ban on telework, and a ban against attaching external drives to office computers. “Other EPA employees were caught possessing marijuana, illegally deleting federal records, violating transparency laws and stealing federal funds, but were still not fired,” Barton reported. And, as previous noted in this space, there was the case of John Beale, a senior policy adviser in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation making $200,000 a year, who disappeared for months at a time, claiming falsely that he was doing “intelligence work for the CIA in Pakistan.” (He was eventually convicted of fraud.)

Dr. Steven J. Allen (JD, PhD) is the Vice President and Chief Investigative Office at Capital Research Center.