The United States Congress is considering complex legislation that would regulate, restrict and tax the use of hydrocarbon energy; mandate and subsidize land- and resource-intensive wind and solar energy; and impose major costs on American consumers, businesses and taxpayers. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering regulatory actions that would achieve the same results.
The US Chamber of Commerce has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to appoint an independent judge to hear testimony and review the scientific evidence that EPA is using to support its finding that CO2-induced climate change endangers human health and welfare.

An EPA endangerment finding would be the most complex and costly rulemaking in history. It would put EPA in control of all economic development in the United States, at a time when growing numbers of scientists question theories of human-caused catastrophic global warming, and acknowledge increasing evidence that climate change is primarily natural. Congressional action would have the same effect.
And yet, EPA will not allow its analysis and science to be challenged or reviewed in a courtroom setting, and Congress strictly limits testimony that could demonstrate major flaws in climate disaster claims.

As EPA scientist and economist Alan Carlin has noted, EPA and Congress have “wrongly relied on very questionable UN conclusions.” They need to “go through the scientific arguments themselves and not rely on what others outside the EPA have said.” Sound science demands that global warming claims be treated with skepticism until proven true, he emphasized. And yet, the agency told him via an email: “The [EPA] administrator and the [Obama] administration have decided to move forward … and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”  In fact, EPA  has suppressed and redacted internal reports that disagree with its proposed policy. Congress likewise refuses to permit full, robust debate.

Before Congress or EPA makes what could be a harmful and irreversible decision, we must recognize that the age of Reality TV gives us citizens the previously unavailable means to do what our government refuses to do: hold an open, fair, balanced television trial … and publicly examine the evidence.

Such a trial would fully, fairly and publicly examine catastrophic climate change science. The news special could hire a well respected, retired trial judge to hear the case, and offer both a business or citizens’ organization and an environmental group the right to hire counsel, present witnesses and try the case before the judge. In short, we could have a “Reality TV” trial of cap-and-trade and endangerment science on Fox News – so that Americans and people the world over can hear scientific and economic evidence for and against the proposed decisions. 

This program would attract a vast world-wide audience and, for the first time, let the public be involved in getting to the truth on a vitally important public policy, in a robust, transparent courtroom setting. 

The need for this program is self-evident. Before the governments of the world spend trillions of dollars on a “solution,” we must make sure we know exactly what the problem is, and how we can best address it. Otherwise, we could spend vast sums of taxpayer and consumer money on unproven programs; grant unprecedented power to government agencies to regulate the US economy; find large-scale wind, solar and other energy projects stymied by still more environmental review and permitting delays; and impose major costs on American families, businesses and industries – for little or no change in temperature, climate or weather events, but with significant harm to human health and welfare.

Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt, PhD
Geologist, Astronaut and Former US Senator
hhschmitt@earthlink.net