Unable to win over the populace on the supposed dangers of global warming, team Obama is now framing it as a public health issue. That’s according to a new article published yesterday in the ‘Fiscal Times.’ With a number of states and utility companies taking the EPA to court for onerous regulations being placed on fossil-fueled power plants, Obama is using this new study, published in Nature Climate Change, in its ongoing public relations campaign. The study used computer modeling to predict the impact on human health from power plants, specifically soot and ozone.
Since 1988, global warming has become a cause célèbre for many Democrats and a handful of scientists, with computer model predictions flying fast and furious on the devastating impacts from a warming world. Except none have come to fruition. From size and frequency of hurricanes to increased tornadoes to more droughts to less snow to more rainfall, global warming has turned out to be all fizzle and no pizazz. Even the satellite datasheets show no increase in temperatures for the last 18.5 years, better known on the streets as the global warming hiatus.
Not content to chalk this up to their overly dramatic computer models and extol the fact that carbon dioxide is not the bogeyman they would have the world believe, they are trotting out the “public health” canard in their ongoing attempt to separate taxpayers from their money. Even the authors of the new study write that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions do not pose a threat to public health. Soot and ozone, however, can and do affect a person’s ability to breathe and have been linked to asthma and lung cancer. That is why many coal-fired power plants are instituting soot and ozone collection schemes regardless of the EPA’s stance.
By cobbling CO2 together with soot and ozone, the White House can produce misleading “fact sheets” that have little to do with global warming and more to do with keeping campaign promises. “We know climate change will put vulnerable populations at greater risk ‚Äì including the elderly, our kids, and people already suffering from burdensome allergies, asthma, and other illnesses,” the White House said recently in a fact sheet. “Pre-existing health conditions make older adults susceptible to the cardiac and respiratory impacts of air pollution. Higher rates of diabetes, obesity, or asthma in some communities may place them at greater risk of climate-related health impacts.”
A number of states’ attorneys generals are taking the Obama administration to task over these misleading statements and utilizing the only thing left in their arsenal: the courts. “The Obama administration’s far-reaching plan to address climate change would cause job losses and lead to higher electricity prices and even power outages,” said two attorneys general at a hearing.
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt told a Senate panel that the plan is “an attempt by President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to ‘expand federal bureaucrats’ authority’ over the way states produce energy. EPA is attempting to ‘force states into shuttering coal-fired power plants’ in an effort to drive the nation away from fossil fuels and other traditional sources of energy,” Pruitt said.
According to The New York Times, Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an energy-industry group, said, “the new study overstated the beneficial impacts of the new EPA rule because the reductions would bring emission levels far below what the EPA had previously said could harm human health.”
By shifting the focus as a mounting public health catastrophe that is already costing the country “tens of billions of dollars a year in medical costs and lost productivity,” Obama is hoping this new study will foment more action by a disinterested public who appear skeptical of all the dire warnings. When Obama said that his daughter suffered from asthma caused by climate change, the media and health community pounced on that statement as being highly misleading. It was more likely caused, they said, by his multi-pack-a-day cigarette habit and the secondhand smoke she was exposed to throughout her life.
