‘Regulation Reality Tour’ Peddles Polluter Lies, Endangering American Prosperity

Our guest blogger is Rick Piltz, founder of Climate Science Watch.

Next week (on March 22) in Arkansas, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) will kick off a nationwide “Regulation Reality Tour” to block U.S. efforts under the Clean Air Act to protect the health and welfare of Americans by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The tour “will feature AFP’s very own EPA Carbon Cops in their environmentally friendly Smart cars,” and offer free donuts, lunch, and dinner along the way.

Americans for Prosperity describes itself as “an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels.” With strong and generous support from Charles and David Koch, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, AFP claims that actions to address climate change are based on “global warming alarmism” and will wreck the economy. AFP is part of larger network of libertarian organizations with close ties to the Koch brothers that distort climate change science and economics to undermine public support for government action to address the problem.

AFP generally says very little specifically about the science of climate change beyond repeatedly stating that regulatory steps by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and legislation being considered by Congress are based on “global warming alarmism” — weasel wording used to dismiss the scientific basis for action with few specific details on what AFP believes or doesn’t believe about climate change. AFP says the “costly so-called ‘solutions’ to global warming” being considered by government would “have only a miniscule impact on global temperature and would not be detectable against the background of natural variation.”

Peggy Venable, AFP’s State Director for Texas, is less restrained. In an opinion piece titled The Feds are Messing with Texas in The Lone Star Report (29 January 2009), she says:

The scientific establishment has dropped the ball. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. On the contrary it makes crops and forests grow faster. We exhale carbon dioxide.

She goes on to discuss the science-based finding by the EPA that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Specifically, she praised a response to EPA’s endangerment finding that was being contemplated by the state of Texas and suggested by an AFP ally “who proposes attacking the EPA as a purveyor of bad science under federal statutes that prohibit junk science by agencies.” Read more