Yesterday, Delaware hosted the first of three unofficial “people’s hearings” on Scott Pruitt’s move to repeal and replace the Clean Power Plan. There’s a hearing today in New York and one in Maryland on Thursday. Those who can’t attend can still submit a comment for the public record. Here is where you can comment on the repeal, which closes next week, and here’s the page for the replacement plan.
Please go make some smart comments, because the deniers are certainly making dumb ones. In particular we now turn to the UK’s Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, who wrote a formal letter published for your reading pleasure this weekend on Steve Milloy’s JunkScience blog.
For those of you not up-to-date on your disgraced British aristocrats-cum-climate deniers, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is a member of the UK’s upper class who used the title “Lord” until he was told to stop by Parliament. Monckton doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo: he still uses a knock-off of the House of Lords logo for his letterhead. He’s a far cry from the working-class, America-first type figure the Trump administration is supposedly trying to help by rolling back regulations. (Though given that he’s too offensively homophobic for even the far-right UKIP party, perhaps he will have some sway with Trump’s team.)
The meat of Monckton’s message for the US EPA is that there are fundamental errors in climate models and that a doubling of CO2 concentrations will lead to only 1.25°C instead of 3.3°C. These claims are is based on a 2015 paper written by Monckton (download here) which got soundly thrashed by real scientists for being wrong in too many ways to summarize. If Pruitt were to actually cite Monckton’s paper and his accompanying comment, odds are slim it would hold up in court.
Curiously, at the end of his letter, Monckton mentions “the moral dimension” of continuing to use fossil fuels. Millions of people worldwide, Monckton claims, “die of particulate emissions from smoke in their cooking fires.” Apparently there is “a Holocaust of such deaths” and climate policies “are now the main reason for this invisible genocide.”
Look past the utterly misplaced hyperbole of the energy poverty myth, and you see that Monckton is blaming particulate matter pollution for people dying. That stands in stark contrast to Milloy’s staunch denial that particulate pollution causes deaths, as evidenced by recent posts that have viciously attacked the science and scientists linking particulate pollution to mortality.
Even Monckton, the man who has said for years he has found a cure for AIDS, among other outlandish claims, isn’t as deeply in denial as Steve Milloy. Monckton sets the bar mighty low, but Milloy manages to slip under even that rock-bottom Brenchley-mark.
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