The American Spectator

Up until a few months ago, corporate leaders stood poised to sell out America’s free enterprise system for a European regulatory regime modeled after the Kyoto Protocol. But this coalition now appears to be unraveling in the aftermath of the “climategate” scandal. BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar have all announced they are pulling out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of American companies and green pressure groups that supported “cap and trade” anti-emissions policies.

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy, for The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), cautions against complacency on the part of free market organizations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) remains poised to impose new regulations under the Clean Air Act that could dramatically raise energy prices, he warns.

“These announcements are most welcome, but they do not mean that we can relax our efforts to defeat and roll back energy-rationing legislation and regulations,” Ebell said in a press release.  “Many policies and proposals that would raise energy prices through the roof for American consumers and destroy millions of jobs in energy-intensive industries still pose a huge threat.  These include the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act, environmental pressure group efforts to use the Endangered Species Act to stop energy production and new power plants, the higher fuel economy standards for new passenger vehicles enacted in 2007, presidential executive orders, and bills in Congress to require more renewable electricity, higher energy efficiency standards for buildings, and low carbon transportation fuel standards.”

It is no secret the scientific “research” coming from the Environmental movement has recently suffered an immense loss of credibility. Over 3,000 emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) have found their way to the Internet exposing the junk science that has given rise to manmade global warming theories. CRU is the incubator for many of those researchers who have authored the United Nations’ global warming reports and fueled the political movement to regulate carbon.

 The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Committee on climate change is still reeling from a huge scandal over the quality of it’s research and the effort to suppress its critics as it issued a report that claimed the Himalayan glaciers could likely disappear by 2035. 

 A leading “environmental expert” in Ecuador, whose research served as the foundation for environmental claims against Chevron, has been exposed as having ownership in companies that would financially benefit from clean up efforts. Radical environmental groups such as Amazon Defense Coalition and Rainforest Action Network have seized on this flawed research and have perpetuated the false claims.

 Respected members of the scientific community are stepping forward to challenge the research of the politically correct environmental movement. Australian geologist Ian Plimer outraged the environmental community last year after publishing the latest of his six-book series denouncing man-made global warming theories. He has published some 60 papers on the subject suggesting that climate change is part of a natural cycle of the earth’s evolution and has little to do with man’s impact.

As Ebell points out, there remains a concerted effort underway to impose burdensome regulations at the expense of American consumers. Nevertheless, CEI and other conservative activists deserve enormous credit for exposing the perfidy of business leaders who should be the natural allies for the free market system.