On his Fox News show today, comedian Glenn Beck interviewed Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) to mock the danger of global warming. In what he billed as an “Inconvenient Segment,” Beck argued that a “smoking gun” memo proves that the proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding on the threat of global warming pollution is based on politics instead of science.
“It turns out, the truth that’s inconvenient is that it’s not like any of this stuff is based on, you know, science. It’s all politics,” Beck said of the danger of carbon pollution. He concluded:
By the way, just so you know, this show has won so many science awards, sometimes we get talking about high-falutin science things like this, and people are like, “What are you talkin’ about?” So let me break it down. Carbon dioxide is basically this. (Exhales.) Look at how much pollution I just put out.
Watch it:
Unless you eat fossil fuels, spewing hot air from one’s mouth is not a major source for pollution…except for Glenn Beck.
Barrasso told Beck that the Obama administration is using the threat of EPA regulation of carbon dioxide “as a club to force cap-and-trade taxes,” but that he is using this memo to say, “Hey look, the science isn’t behind you.”
As Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag explained, however, the White House agreed that the “proposed finding is carefully rooted in both law and science,” and the “OMB simply collated and collected disparate comments from various agencies during the inter-agency review process of the proposed finding.” The author of the skeptical comments forwarded by the OMB was Joseph M. Johnson, a Bush administration holdover in the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. In 2005, Johnson joined the SBA from the Mercatus Center, an anti-regulatory think tank founded by right-wing pollution giant Koch Industries.