RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.

Follow the mainstream media (especially the New York Times), and one concludes that all of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are straight out of Central Casting of villainy for the MSM narratives of Republicans. Jeff Sessions, for example, supposedly is a racist segregationist who would love to join the Ku Klux Klan — but holds back because some Klansmen smoke pot. And Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator, wants us to die horrible deaths on a polluted, overheated planet.

An NYT headline last December 7 read, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.” In modern political speak, a “climate change denialist” is like a Holocaust denier. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, along with 17 Democratic state attorneys general, demands criminal prosecution of oil executives and scientists that do not acknowledge the view of climate change as outlined in the Democratic Party platform. According to the Times,

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

Indeed, scientists are in disagreement about “the degree and extent of global warming” and while the NYT and its allies condemn anyone who veers from “climate-change orthodoxy,” this issue does need to be debated, and someone with political courage needs to be able to stand up against the political and media bullying of the Left. Pruitt’s article in National Review raises important legal, scientific, and, yes, moral questions about EPA policies under President Obama, but to question the climate orthodoxy pushed by the Left today invites massive pushback, and there will be a firestorm of opposition to the Pruitt nomination.

Environmentalists and their political and media allies will claim that if Pruitt is appointed and reverses some of Obama’s policies (and there is no way he can overturn everything that the EPA did in the past eight years), then Earth itself will suffer an irreversible environmental decline. For example, when Republicans called for very minor changes in environmental policies in 1995, NYT columnist Anthony Lewis screeched that Republicans “want feces to wash up on our beaches.”