My testimony at the EPA last week:

May, 24, 2012
EPA Docket Center
Room 3334,
1301 Constitution Ave., NW,
Washington, DC, 20460. 

Reference: Public hearings on proposed carbon pollution standard for new power plants.

I’m sure you know that CO2 levels are now at 396.18 parts per million (PPM) according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s over 116 PPM higher than any time in the last 800,000 years during which it hovered around 280 PPM. That increase happened in roughly the last 120 years.

We know beyond any doubt that this rapid increase is due to humans burning fossil fuels. We are also seeing the effects of this level of CO2 in frequent and severe storms in some areas and more prolonged severe droughts in others. These events are causing billions of dollars in property and business losses and displacing millions of people globally. It will, in the near future, cause catastrophic disruption to water supplies, agriculture production, and food availability to millions of people on several continents leading to famine and wars.

Due to this, and given no matter how you burn oil, gas, wood or coal, it’s end product is CO2 that further exacerbates the problem. That’s why this proposal for a carbon pollution standard for new power plants won’t work. 

 At this writing there is no known technology that can “reduce” CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels or to sequester it. That’s a pipe dream. Our only option is to stop burning it. Shift the oil company subsidies to non-carbon based energy technology as soon as possible and get that technology moving.

Much of the delay is caused from the politicization of climate change by anti-science campaigns well funded by the fossil fuel industry and orchestrated by “think tanks” like the Heartland Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute, to name a few. With the overwhelming peer-reviewed science that supports the fact that climate change is real, dangerous, and urgent, how did the government let hearsay triumph science?

The United States Government has squandered precious time by not taking this problem serious enough years ago when we could have lessened the impacts of climate change by keeping CO2 levels lower. What’s even worse, the United States’ leadership on the world stage has been abysmal causing critical delays in worldwide cooperation.

The Administration needs to get some backbone, shut the climate deniers up, and get us off of fossil fuels now. For the sake of the continuation of the human race why in the name of God aren’t you doing this?
Richard Whiteford – The Climate Reality Project
908 Covington Drive

Downingtown, PA 19335   610-246-7974 - Savebisophere3@verizon.net

“Follow the money” advised Deep Throat, the clandestine informer in the movie All the President’s Men about the Watergate break-in. Well, that advice also applies to the massive disinformation campaign financed by the fossil fuel industry and promoted by the Heartland Institute to convince government officials and the public that climate change is a hoax in spite of the fact that peer reviewed science and every National Academy of Science on the planet proves otherwise.

 Very little of Heartland’s anti-climate “science” is peer reviewed which means that it is not really science. Much of it comes from the infamous Fred Singer and his phony Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP). Fred Singer is the “scientist” that the tobacco industry held up against medical research to claim that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Then the chemical industry paraded him out to claim that CFC’s didn’t destroy ozone in the atmosphere. Now, in perfect succession, he goes against overwhelming evidence that proves climate change is very real and at a very dangerous level. In fact Singer is so bogus that he listed Fredrick Seitz as Chairman of SEPP on his IRS 990 forms for two years after Seitz died.  Not only that, there are some highly questionable money transactions being investigate with both SEPP and Heartland along with a few other “think tanks”.

The Heartland Institute boasts of feeding their disinformation to 7,300 state elected officials and 8,400 county and local officials. They say “they reach more elected officials, more often, than any other think tank in the U.S.” Considering that Heartland is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization with restrictions on lobbying activities it would seem they are in violation of the nonprofit laws.

In preparation for its International Conference on Climate Change from May 21 - 23 in Chicago, Heartland sponsored the most sophomoric hysterically lunatic billboard campaign depicting people who believe in the peer reviewed proven climate science as being like some of the world’s most notorious criminals like Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, and Osama bin Laden. Really now!

Considering all of the above, who in their right mind would give the Heartland Institute the time of day – other than likeminded paranoids?  Besides the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry it will be interesting to see who continues to fund them, and even more interesting, who with any serious level of credibility will be willing to be seen in public with them.