Greenies Are Apoplectic: The EPA Slush Fund Calls Their Paper

To paraphrase Robert Duvall (Col. Kilgore) in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of whining in the morning. It smells like… government funding”.

While most of the Democratic rent seekers are obsessing about The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, their brothers-in-arms in the environmental shakedown have been bemoaning the defenestration of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump. (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CONGRESS_EPA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-29-17-56-41)

Started by Richard Nixon (you read that right) the EPA has morphed from an agency protecting the environment to a slush fund for green ideologues looking for easy public money and slavish media attention. In a perfect constitutional framework these funds would all have been approved by the U.S. Congress. But with Republicans controlling Congress since 2010, there was no support for greasing the partisan skids of the energy hysterics.

So President Barack The First circumvented the constitutional process with executive orders that sent cash washing into the nest of green loyalists in the EPA. The greenies were thus encouraged to hamstring the public with regulatory gridlock. (Famously, the EPA declared that CO2, the gas that gives life to plants and living things, be designated a pollutant.)

Money was also distributed in the form of grants to friends in non-governmental agencies and green kabuki theatre to scorn fossil fuels and fly to UN conferences around the globe. News that this spigot of other people’s money was closing sent the Usual Suspects running to their media lap dogs to bleat about the end of the world as we knew it, etc.

Code Red was declared. Evidence of conflicts were given the blue pencil. Hey, it worked under Barry, it’s got to work now?

We shall see. As noted by the Daily Caller (http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/21/nonprofits-angry-about-trumps-budget-cuts-hid-the-179-million-they-took-from-the-epa/), the top six non-profits screaming blue murder over Trump’s plan to cut a third of the EPA’s budget have themselves been the beneficiaries of $179 million in EPA gelt since 2009. A fact that did not appear in their furious press releases.

Another example of the undisclosed conflict is TV bingo caller Jimmy Kimmel, who excoriated new EPA chief Scott Pruitt in a tweet:  “@jimmykimmel Put simply, Scott Pruitt is a piece of shit. If you care about the outdoors, stop him http://act.americanrivers.org/page/speakout/oppose-polluting-pruitt?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=americanrivers … #PruittHearing”

When not getting Oscar winners mixed up, Kimmel is also a director of American Rivers, one of those virtuous organizations beloved by celebrities and trust-fund layabouts. His harangue establishes him and his pals as the final bulwark against a poisonous future. What he’s less forthcoming about is his own interest.  When not posturing for public sympathy American Rivers was receiving $2.5 million in EPA grants— a fact Kimmel neglected to mention in his scatological tweet about Pruitt. 

It’s not just cultural warriors complaining about the pump drying up. The American Lung Association also joined the chorus decrying Trump’s luddite ways. While the ALA no doubt does fine work it also received $16.9 million from EPA during the Obama administration. A fact it doesn’t willingly advance in its complaints.

For some reason, the EPA’s largest grant was to Senior Service America Inc., which employs seniors in low-paying work. While this sounds like a useful service, how it relates to the environmental cause is a mystery (Senior Service America Inc. received more than $533 million since 2010 from EPA and other government agencies according to tax filings). But hey, it’s someone else’s money, right?

This cheque-book activism thrives in the chasm over whether you believe the fancycomputer climate simulations from Big Green or your own lyin’ eyes. The Trump ascension has allowed contrary opinion to finally emergein Washington after the Obama years— much to the chagrin of the settled scientists (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference). 

As writer Mark Steyn foresaw in the run up to the 2008 presidential election, putting statist darling Barack Obama in the White House would enshrine new entitlements in government that would be impossible to extricate. The recent Republican meltdown over ending Obama’s greatest entitlement— Obamacare— proves the impossibility of reform when the public gets a hold of free stuff— proving Steyn’s supposition. 

Still it’s an amusing diversion to see the discomfort of so many righteous people at having to justify their raiding the till. And to have their settled science questioned. Like Colonel Kilgore they don’t take well to being contradicted. “If I say its safe to surf this beach, Captain, then its safe to surf this beach!”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com)