RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened and politicized the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for eight years by presenting his crippling policies as altruistic when in fact they were designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democratic Party with its “resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established by executive order under President Richard Nixon in 1970 and then ratified in the House and Senate. The primary mission of the EPA was the protection of human health and the environment through writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by the US Congress. At that time in history the growing public awareness of environmental issues stimulated the creation of non-governmental environmental protection agencies as well. The most famous was Greenpeace, which was created by environmental activists from Canada and the US.

Founding Greenpeace member Patrick Moore is now a vociferous critic of Greenpeace and its support for the unscientific politically motivated insistence upon man-made climate change. The extraordinary 6-minute video below is Dr. Moore’s testimony in front of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on Oversight on February 25, 2014.

The video chronicles Moore’s environmental activism as a young man and member of Greenpeace 1971-1986 to his current unequivocal rejection of the pseudo-science being used to support the unsupportable claims of man-made global warming and climate change. (Transcript of his testimony)

To understand why huckster-in-chief Obama insisted and continues to insist that climate change is man-made and the greatest threat to America it is necessary to understand the huckster and the hoax.
The huckster:

Obama was groomed by the globalist elite to bring “hope and change” to America, but it was not the hope or change that most Americans understood those words to mean. Barack Obama is a globalist and ideologically a radical socialist tutored in Saul Alinsky’s 1971 “Rules for Radicals.” Alinsky’s “Rules” is the guidebook for social revolution and transforming a democratic America into a socialist state. Socialism with its cradle-to-grave government control is the necessary political structure before imposition of the globalist elite’s end-game of one-world government. Barack Obama is a malignant narcissist whose self-aggrandizing personality made him the perfect puppet and most lawless president in US history. His stunning executive overreach was rivaled only by his greater crime of corrupting the impartiality of the US government by politicizing its agencies and using them to advance his personal political goals to weaken and destroy America. Barack Obama is a pawn of the globalist elites – the perfect con man.
The hoax:

The Humanitarian Hoax of climate change is the whopper of the 21st century. It is a deliberate political scheme to transfer the wealth of industrialized nations (particularly the US) to non-industrialized nations. It is globalized socialism where the assets of productive nations are transferred to non-productive nations. WHY?

Starting in 2009, the Obama administration began regulating greenhouse gas emissions through a so-called “endangerment finding” by which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined greenhouse gases pose an unacceptable risk to human health and welfare. The most prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is a natural substance that it is virtually everywhere and in everything. As a result, the endangerment finding provided the federal government with a springboard to arrogate to itself authority to regulate practically every nook and cranny of our nation’s economy.

The administration lost no time in using it. Starting with the transportation and electricity sectors, Obama’s EPA made plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from mining, manufacturing, construction, and farming operations, at the risk of displacing not only millions of American workers but also severely fettering the nation’s vibrant marketplace.

California provides a cautionary tale of central planning scenarios likely to arise from an unchecked endangerment finding. Under recently enacted state laws aimed a regulating greenhouse gases, Sacramento is on a path to dictating the fate of energy, transportation, agriculture, water, waste management, land use, and “green buildings” throughout the Golden State. Known as the Scoping Plan, these authoritarian economic controls are redolent of Soviet efforts at central planning.

An echo of California’s approach is found at the federal level in the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, a regulatory behemoth wholly dependent on the endangerment finding. The Clean Power Plan imposes unprecedented burdens on electricity generation, distribution, and retail sales, requiring a wholesale shift from fossil fuels to renewables and risking soaring electricity costs along with brownouts and blackouts. The Supreme Court stayed the Clean Power Plan pending legal challenges, and President Trump also issued an executive order instructing the EPA to reconsider the plan. But as long as the endangerment finding remains on the books, the energy sector is not safe from the EPA’s assumption of centralized controls based on regulating carbon dioxide emissions.

However, the EPA missed an important step in making the endangerment finding. Specifically, the EPA was required by statute to seek peer review from the Science Advisory Board, a blue-ribbon panel of experts established by Congress to ensure that EPA’s regulations are based on accurate data and sound science. For more than 40 years, the EPA routinely sought peer review from the board for its regulatory proposals. But it refused to do so when the time came for the endangerment finding. Why?

By rushing to judgment, the EPA was able to circumvent the Science Advisory Board and advance the Obama administration’s ideological assumption that the endangerment finding was needed to protect human health and welfare. Despite the EPA’s acknowledgement that there are “varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues,” it nevertheless concluded that the excessive rule was necessary with a 90–99 percent degree of certainty — a level of certainty that should give even the most fervent supporters of greenhouse gas emissions controls pause.

On May 1, the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed an administrative petition with the EPA on behalf of a number of businesses, trade associations, and individuals. The petition, which asks the agency to reconsider the endangerment finding by seeking input from the Science Advisory Board, gives the new EPA administrator the opportunity to correct the Obama administration’s failure to obtain peer review. The EPA must comply with the law, just like the rest of us. Moreover, only with the open and studied process mandated by Congress for reviewing the scientific adequacy of regulatory action can the EPA make a sound decision on this economically fraught issue.

Ted Hadzi-Antich, senior attorney, and Ryan D. Walters, attorney, are with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and represent the parties asking EPA to reconsider the Endangerment Finding.

WASHINGTON – Back with a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore reflected on his 2006 prediction that “the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years” if “drastic measures” were not taken to combat climate change.

Gore was asked why he made that prediction in the first film and if he has another prediction to make about climate change now 11 years later.

“First of all, we’ve seen a lot of progress since the first movie came out. We have the Paris agreement now. The cost of renewable energy has come down so quickly that people are switching over. Unfortunately, some levels of the Earth system have crossed a point of no return,” Gore said during an interview with PJM on the green carpet of the An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power screening Wednesday evening at the Newseum.

“The big chunk of the West Antarctic ice sheet, for example, makes a considerable amount of sea level rise inevitable in the future. But we still have the ability to stop short of other points of no return and we now have the solutions available to really solve this crisis. We need the political will, but political will is a renewable resource,” he added.

Gore recently said the U.S. still has time to “avoid catastrophe” related to the effects of climate change. PJM asked Gore what specific catastrophe he thinks might occur.

“I’m very optimistic because the entire world has now reached the agreement in Paris to go down to net-zero global warming pollution as early in the second half of this century as possible,” Gore replied. “Many countries are making dramatic changes now and, regardless of President Trump’s statement about the Paris agreement, our governors and mayors and business leaders are stepping up to fill the gap. I think we’re going to meet our obligations under the Paris agreement regardless of what he does.”

Jeff Skoll, a producer of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, said Gore was not predicting the “end of the world” when he said in 2006 that the “point of no return” would be reached within 10 years.

“The 10 year ago prediction wasn’t that it would be the end of the world, it would just be it’s going to be a lot harder 10 years from now if we don’t get started,” he said. “So here’s the good news: we actually have solutions now that we didn’t have 10 years ago. We have solar panels and wind that are less than the price of coal, which has always been, sort of, the lowest energy cost. We have batteries that are about to hit the next generation. We have electric cars that are a lot of fun to drive and are taking off.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Just exactly how much has the climate changed in recent decades? Longtime New York Times readers can be forgiven if they are now thoroughly confused on the matter.

Last month this column noted that the actions of the New York Times suggest that the people who put out the newspaper don’t think burning carbon is as dangerous as one would think from reading their product. How else to explain their marketing effort to persuade well-heeled readers to increase emissions by travelling the globe aboard a barely-filled Boeing ? And now, one particularly industrious Times reader submits evidence of another reason to resist the paper’s climate faith. In this case the skepticism about global warming comes not from refusing to take the paper seriously but from taking it too seriously.

Anyone old enough to have been a Times reader in the late 1980s may recall a series of stories that helped educate the public on how cool our planet used to be. Here’s one report from March of 1988:

One of the scientists, Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said he used the 30-year period 1950-1980, when the average global temperature was 59 degrees Fahrenheit, as a base to determine temperature variations.

The paper returned to the topic in June of that year, and reminded readers of the planet’s colder past:

Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980’s. Compared with a 30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a degree higher last year.

The following year, the paper reported a new record high in global temperatures and affirmed its climate history, which seemed to be the consensus view—at least among scientists quoted by the Times:

The British readings showed that the average global temperature in 1988 was 0.612 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the long-term average for the period 1950 through 1979, which is a base for comparing global temperatures. The average worldwide temperature for that 30-year period is roughly 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the British researchers said.

In 1991, the Times reported yet another record high, and published yet another reminder of how cool the planet used to be:

The Goddard group found that the record average surface temperature for the globe was eight-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit above the 1951-1980 average of 59 degrees. The British group found it seventh-tenths of a degree higher than the 1951-80 average.

By that point a reasonable consumer might have been ardently hoping to return to that magical era in which global temperatures averaged just 59 degrees. But in the ensuing years it must have been difficult for Times readers to stay hopeful. As the years and then the decades rolled by, The Times routinely reported record or near-record highs as global temperatures appeared to march ever higher.

In January of this year, the newspaper published a feature entitled, “How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record.” The Times noted the disturbing news that “2016 was the first time that the hottest year on record occurred three times in a row.” And things could be about to get much worse. “We expect records to continue to be broken as global warming proceeds,” climate enthusiast Michael Mann told the Times.

Is there any way to return to the salad days of 59 degrees? Well, it turns out to be easier than you might think. In January, as the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was reporting the third consecutive year of record highs, it noted that the average global temperature in 2016 had surged to a sizzling… 58.69 degrees.

Over the years researchers seem to have concluded that the planet was not as hot as they thought. Oops.

The most important facts in the climate debate are subject to frequent revisions. This doesn’t mean the global warming thesis is wrong, but it argues for skepticism. The Journal’s Holman Jenkins noted in 2015:

By the count of researcher Marcia Wyatt in a widely circulated presentation, the U.S. government’s published temperature data for the years 1880 to 2010 has been tinkered with 16 times in the past three years.

While waiting for the science to settle, this column’s advice to Times readers is to go ahead and fly around the world on the newspaper’s luxurious jet—if you don’t mind the company. CONTINUE AT SITE

If you voted for President Trump last fall, David A. Graham at The Atlantic says he has “good news and bad news” about your mental capacities. The good news is, contrary to what other liberal journalists have been saying, you “aren’t impervious to reality.”https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/18/fake-news-junk-science-stronger-together/

But don’t get cocky. The bad news is that you’re shallow and primitive, basing your political preferences on “image and tribal identity.”

Without explicitly saying so, Graham leaves the impression that Hillary Clinton enthusiasts like him are, by contrast, models of dispassionate scientific inquiry. Indeed, he claims his bad news about President Trump’s supporters comes straight from “a new political-science paper” whose main authors are “behind some of the most important work on the impact of corrections and fact-checking in recent years.”

Scientifically certifying the mental unfitness of your political opponents is, of course, the opening move in a very nasty game. The final move comes when the newly minted psychological rejects are consigned to maximum-security “psychiatric hospitals” for a long spell of “treatment.” All that’s required is abandoning the reactionary idea that hospitals should be more hospitable than gulags and, voilà, dissent can be hospitalized as well as criminalized. The most advanced progressive regimes realized this. The hospitalization of dissent was right up there with famine-induced genocide as a favorite technique of the USSR and Mao’s China. So, it’s alarming to hear that top tier progressive academics are boldly using their authority as scientists in ways that will marginalize and silence ordinary folk who happen not to share their views.

But, though a casual reading of their paper might lead one to accept this alarming take on its conclusions, a more careful reading shows that, contrary to Graham, the authors don’t explicitly (important word) draw any conclusions particular to the president’s supporters. The official (another important word) conclusion, though only tested on the latter, is supposed to generalize to everyone, whether they stood with the president, Secretary Clinton, or that weird little CIA agent from Utah who just won’t go away.

Here’s their thesis statement:

Are citizens willing to accept fact-checks of false or unsupported claims of candidates they support in the heat of a political campaign? Previous studies have reached conflicting conclusions about people’s willingness to update their factual beliefs in response to counter-attitudinal information. To discriminate between these findings, we conducted two experiments during the 2016 presidential campaign . . . These results suggest that corrective information can reduce misperceptions, but will often have minimal effects on candidate evaluations or vote choice.

Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor who became the darling of the green Left by repeatedly claiming the U.S. economy can run solely on renewable energy, has threatened to take legal action against the authors of an article that demolished his claims last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper — whose lead author is Chris Clack, a mathematician who has worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado and now has an energy consulting firm — received coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets, including a piece from yours truly in this space. Clack’s paper went through rigorous vetting and numerous delays that lasted more than a year. Rather than accept any of the criticisms Clack and his nearly two dozen co-authors made, Jacobson responded with tirades on Twitter, EcoWatch, and elsewhere. He claimed that his work doesn’t contain a single error, that all of his critics are whores for hydrocarbons, and that, well, dammit, he’s right. Never mind that Jacobson overstated the amount of available hydropower in the U.S. by roughly a factor of ten and claimed that in just three decades or so, we won’t need any gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel because we will all be flying to Vegas in hydrogen-powered 737s.

But Jacobson has also made it clear that he’s considering litigation. After hearing rumors about his legal threats, I obtained redacted copies of two e-mails Jacobson sent to Clack and his co-authors last month. In one e-mail, sent June 27 at 6:11 p.m., Jacobson warned, “just to keep you informed, I have hired an attorney to address the falsification of claims about our work in the Clack article.” About an hour later, Jacobson sent another e-mail to them. It concluded with Jacobson saying, “Yes, and I have hired an attorney.”

No legal complaints have been filed yet. But by intimating legal action, Jacobson joins company with another thin-skinned climate catastrophist and hero of the green Left: Michael Mann. As readers may know, Mann, a professor at Penn State University — who, by the way, has a star turn in Leonardo DiCaprio’s new climate-disaster pic, Before the Flood — sued National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg, and Mark Steyn for defamation in 2012. The suit demanded a jury trial, and the litigation is still pending. (For Steyn’s paint-blistering take on Mann and climate McCarthyism, read his 2015 Senate testimony.)

Mann’s litigation and Jacobson’s implied threat to sue show how influential, well-funded climate scientist-activists are resorting to bully tactics to try to intimidate their intellectual antagonists. Rather than engage in civil, fact-based debate about climate change and climate policy, Mann and his fellow travelers have engaged in public smear campaigns against other scientists.

For a comment on this, I contacted Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado who has written extensively about climate issues. For his efforts, Pielke was the target of a years-long smear campaign that was engineered by John Podesta’s henchmen at the Center for American Progress. CAP’s Joe Romm, who refused to debate Pielke in public, published dozens of articles trashing Pielke. Later, a batch of Podesta’s e-mails, which were disclosed by WikiLeaks, showed Judd Legum, an editor at ThinkProgress (a CAP-affiliated site), bragging to California billionaire Tom Steyer that he and his colleagues, by trashing Pielke, had prevented Pielke from “providing important cover for climate deniers.” Pielke was also targeted by U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva, (D., Ariz.), who in 2015 sent a letter to the University of Colorado demanding to know how much money Pielke was getting from the oil-and-gas sector. (The answer: none.)

If the climate alarmists weren’t still so politically powerful and represented in Congress by their devoted cult members, it would almost be easy to pity them. Why? Because they’re so spectacularly wrong about so many things.

They keep the hype coming regardless, as in this article that cites the fact that it’s hot in the desert in the summertime to say that air travel may be doomed.

But science, or something.

The cult’s leader — Al Gore — said in 2009 that there was a 75 percent chance that the entire arctic polar ice cap would melt by 2014.

It’s still there.

The year before the North Pole was supposed to be gone, noted climate scientist Hans von Storch went against cult orthodoxy in an interview with Spiegel Online in 2013 and had some interesting things to say about the climate prediction models so revered by the alarmists.

After noting that “climate change seems to be taking a break,” von Storch had this to say about the models:

“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

He followed that up with this after being asked what might be wrong with the models:

There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.

After so many swings and misses while attempting to predict doomsday as being just around the corner, the alarmists have decided to provide themselves a little cover:

Climate alarmist James Hansen’s prediction of Manhattan being underwater by 2018 seems to not be happening, so he’s moving his own goal posts and saying “50 to 150 years” now.

That’s the beauty of being one of the “we believe in science” people: there’s never any penalty for being wrong. Every prediction that doesn’t come true isn’t a cause for reflection about perhaps adjusting the conclusion; it’s merely an opportunity to pull a new prediction out of thin air.

Perhaps they are finally getting embarrassed, though. Tossing all of the predictions a century down the road at least saves them from having to be around when those are proved wrong.

Unless, of course, the real scientists who are working on aging and extending life have some big success soon.

This is a commentary piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt’s plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left’s pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become. The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought. The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell’s classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable.

All totalitarianism purports to rest upon “science,” and all totalitarian science slavishly follows what the state and the party of statism desire. Institutions are inevitably infiltrated by leftists and used to rubber-stamp whatever the state wants. Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed how any academicians who question Darwin’s increasingly silly theory of evolution by natural selection are hounded, denied tenure, and even fired for questioning authority and deviating from orthodoxy.

The drones turned out by academia who willingly put on blinders and indifferently accept as scientific dogma whatever the left wishes are not scientists, whatever credentials institutions may give them. They are simply cadres or hacks who reject scientific inquiry and embrace political correctness by blessing it as “science.”

Global warming is a perfect example of how this works. Leftists parrot the line of “settled science,” oblivious to the fact that “settled science” is murdered science. Science is a process, not a result, and science demands that conventional opinion be rigorously questioned. The true scientists are those who do just that, but institutions vomit these true scientists out and recoil in horror that anyone dare question the party line.

The history of science has often been the history of a Newton or Maxwell or Kelvin or Einstein or Heisenberg proposing new explanations for phenomena that turned “settled science” on its head. The consensus opinion of scientists has been wrong so often that it is a wonder that anyone who professes to be a “scientist” would ever present this sort of “majority rules” science as anything but comedy.

It is a sad commentary on life today that the will of the majority permeates almost everything we do as social creatures, including, now, the pseudo-science of institutionalized “science.” As sad as that is – because it means the death of real science – it is frightening that so many political leaders have so suspended any critical thinking or independent reflection that they follow the herd mentality even in this area.

Mr. Milloy served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.”

The Trump administration in May began the process of replacing the small army of outside science advisers at the Environmental Protection Agency. In June, 38 additional EPA advisers were notified that their appointments would not be renewed in August. To Mr. Trump’s critics, this is another manifestation of his administration’s “war on science.” Histrionics aside, the administration’s actions are long overdue.

The most prominent of the EPA’s myriad boards of outside advisers are the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC. Mostly made up of university professors, these boards also frequently draw members from consulting firms and activist groups. Only rarely do members have backgrounds in industry. All EPA boards are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that they be balanced and unbiased. While the EPA is required by law to convene the SAB and CASAC, the agency is not bound by law to heed their advice.

The EPA’s Obama -era “war on coal” rules and its standards for ground-level ozone—possibly the most expensive EPA rule ever issued—depend on the same scientifically unsupported notion that the fine particles of soot emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes are lethal. The EPA claims that such particles kill hundreds of thousands of Americans annually.

The EPA first considered regulating fine particles in the mid-1990s. But when the agency ran its claims past CASAC in 1996, the board concluded that the scientific evidence did not support the agency’s regulatory conclusion. Ignoring the panel’s advice, the EPA’s leadership chose to regulate fine particles anyway, and resolved to figure out a way to avoid future troublesome opposition from CASAC.

In 1996 two-thirds of the CASAC panel had no financial connection to the EPA. By the mid-2000s, the agency had entirely flipped the composition of the advisory board so two-thirds of its members were agency grantees. Lo and behold, CASAC suddenly agreed with the EPA’s leadership that fine particulates in outdoor air kill. During the Obama years, the EPA packed the CASAC panel. Twenty-four of its 26 members are now agency grantees, with some listed as principal investigators on EPA research grants worth more than $220 million.

Although the scientific case against particulate matter hasn’t improved since the 1990s, the EPA has tightened its grip on CASAC. In effect, EPA-funded researchers are empowered to review and approve their own work in order to rubber-stamp the EPA’s regulatory agenda. This is all done under the guise of “independence.”

Another “independent” CASAC committee conducted the most recent review of the Obama EPA’s ground-level ozone standards. Of that panel’s 20 members, 70% were EPA grantees who’d hauled in more than $192 million from the agency over the years. These EPA panels make decisions by consensus, which has lately been easy enough to achieve considering they are usually chaired by an EPA grantee.

Would-be reformers have so far had no luck changing the culture at these EPA advisory committees. In 2016 the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, where I am a senior fellow, sued the agency. We alleged that the CASAC fine-particulate subcommittee was biased—a clear violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. We found a plaintiff who had been refused CASAC membership because of his beliefs about fine particles. Unfortunately, that individual was not willing to take a hostile public stand against the EPA for fear of professional retribution. We ultimately withdrew the suit.

The EPA’s opaque selection process for membership on its advisory boards has opened the agency to charges of bias. In 2016 Michael Honeycutt, chief toxicologist of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, was recommended in 60 of the 83 nominations to the EPA for CASAC membership. The EPA instead selected Donna Kenski of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium. Ms. Kenski received only one of the 83 recommendations. While no one objected to Mr. Honeycutt’s nomination, Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.) lodged an objection to Ms. Kenski’s nomination, claiming she had exhibited partisanship during an earlier term on the committee.

Congress has also tried to reform the EPA’s science advisory process. During the three most recent Congresses, the House has passed bills to provide explicit conflict-of-interest rules for EPA science advisers, including bans on receiving EPA grants for three years before and after service on an advisory panel. The bills went nowhere in the Senate, where the threat of a Democrat-led filibuster loomed. Had they passed, President Obama surely would have vetoed them.

President Trump and his EPA administrator have ample statutory authority to rectify the problem. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt spent years familiarizing himself with the EPA’s unlawful ways. He is in the process of reaffirming the independence of the agency’s science advisory committees. This won’t mean that committee members can’t have a point of view. But a committee as a whole must be balanced and unbiased. Mr. Pruitt’s goal is the one intended by Congress—peer review, not pal review.