One of the ways that I try to raise the consciousness of my fellow humans is by telling them things that they don’t know and then asking them why they don’t already know those things. This admittedly obnoxious behavior is intended to get people to reflect on the fact that they don’t trust big companies in most other aspects of their lives, so why should they trust Big Corporate Media to keep them informed fairly about politics? (I implore my fellow conservatives to stop using the term “the mainstream media,” which concedes the high ground to companies that are out to control our thoughts by not covering any information that contradicts their left-wing narrative.)

The latest example of my “why don’t you already know this” trope is this: “Did you know that President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency just denied a petition from eminent scientists to use the EPA’s existing statutory authority against climate change?”

I haven’t met a “progressive” yet who had a clue that this happened. Guess that just wasn’t part of “all the news that’s fit to print” for the New York Times, CNN, or MSNBC. (Yes, I put the term “progressive” in quotation marks for a reason: It is a loaded term intended to convince your subconscious that progress inevitably means more government control.)

It seems that “Biden & Co.” only care about climate change when it serves as an excuse for getting Congress to give them $370 billion to hand out to their supporters in the name of setting a good example for China and India, who are building polluting plants like crazy. (Yes, I put the term “Biden & Co.” in quotations marks to remind the reader that the Biden family business is influence peddling.)

Biden apparently doesn’t care a whit about climate except when it gives him an excuse to shovel billions of dollars to his supporters. On Sept. 14, the EPA formally denied a petition by former NASA scientist Jim Hansen, one of the first U.S. government officials to raise alarms about climate change, and by several others to use the EPA’s existing authority under section 6 of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to gradually reduce fossil fuel use in applications where there are ready substitutes. In essence, the EPA’s denial says, “We don’t debate that climate change is a real problem, and we agree that we have the existing authority to deal with it under the TSCA; we just think it isn’t necessary to use that authority to address climate change because we’d rather spend billions under the ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’” (Yes, those quotation marks are there for the obvious reason.)

Why didn’t you know that happened? I’ll bet you thought that all those nasty Republican justices on the Supreme Court had deprived the EPA of the authority to address climate change under existing law. Wrong again. They merely said that Congress had not given the EPA the authority to dictate to states the mix of fuels they use to generate electricity. On the contrary, in a 2017 case when he was on the D.C. Circuit, Brett Kavanaugh, then a judge, now a justice, pointed out that the EPA has the legal authority under the TSCA to restrict or phase out “chemical substances” that are harming the climate, and that certainly includes greenhouse gases and fossil fuels. Why do you suppose you haven’t heard that either? Could it be because Big Corporate Media are trying to convince the public that Democrats are the good guys and Republicans are the bad guys?

Some readers may by now want to scream at me that climate change is “the greatest scientific fraud of all time,” to quote my friend and former law partner Buddy Menton. I do recommend Buddy’s excellent series of dozens of articles that raise many interesting and debatable questions about how good humans are at predicting the future of the climate. For example, in the 1970s, numerous scientific articles speculated about the possibility of a new ice age — the opposite of the concerns about global warming that are front and center today.

For my own part, I am not a scientist, although I am married to one, and I don’t feel qualified to judge the scientific issues. While I find Menton’s work entertaining and provocative, I am more inclined to defer to the views of experts like Steven E. Koonin, Bjørn Lomborg, and Dan Yergin, whose excellent books review what we do and do not know about the climate. These three authors all maintain that climate change is real, and human beings and fossil fuels are contributing to it, but that it isn’t an “existential crisis” that is going to kill all of us or destroy the planet, as is sometimes hyped by Big Corporate Media. As Lomborg has repeatedly argued, gradual warming actually saves lives and the key to adapting to it is to make cheap energy available to all. However, for those interested in a deep dive into climate science for themselves, Part II of the Hansen et al. petition contains a 75-page summary.

But arguing the science of climate is beside my points, which for today are only two:

(1) The Biden administration is hypocritical about climate issues and uses them as excuses to funnel money to its supporters. (Check out this Breitbart article, which claims that 80 percent of the so-called “green energy loans” last time around went to bundlers and donors of President Barack Obama, who got millions in subsidies allegedly to encourage more renewable energy.) It isn’t a good sign that the Biden administration recently put “Democratic stalwart” John Podesta in charge of deciding who actually gets the $370 billion allegedly intended to fight climate change.

(2) Big Corporate Media are trying to control your thoughts so that you believe that Democrats are trying their level best to address climate change, but they can’t because those nasty Republicans in Congress and on the courts just won’t let them.