CO2 Coalition, a group established in 2015 to remind the world that carbon dioxide — that much-vilified greenhouse gas — actually does many good things for the planet, filed an amicus curiae brief in Louisiana’s lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Social Cost of Carbon rule. In their brief, CO2 Coalition argues that Biden’s Social Cost of Carbon rule is “scientifically invalid.”
Louisiana, joined by Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming, has asked for an injunction against portions of President Biden’s Executive Order 13990, signed on Biden’s first day in office. Among other things, the executive order places a “social cost” on greenhouse gas emissions.
According to EO 13990, social costs “are estimates of the monetized damages associated with incremental increases in greenhouse gas emissions. They are intended to include changes in net agricultural productivity, human health, property damage from increased flood risk, and the value of ecosystem services.”
But the executive order ignores the positive effects of greenhouse gasses, something which CO2 Coalition refers to in its brief: “A glaring omission in the administration’s proposed regulation are the benefits of carbon dioxide and of the fossil fuels whose burning in the generation of electricity and industrial processes emit the gas.”
The academicians named in the brief are pretty powerful ones: Dr. William Happer, professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Department of Physics and a former Trump administration official; and Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor emeritus at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Both are longtime thorns in the side of climate alarmists. They believe that Biden’s executive order is unscientific.
“Dr. Happer, Dr. Lindzen and the CO2 Coalition Amici believe that the ‘science’ touted by the President and imposed by him on the entire federal government is seriously flawed and not truly scientific. They believe that therefore the ‘climate crisis’ declaration by the President to justify these rules is without a valid scientific basis, arbitrary and capricious,” the brief states.
The brief also slams the idea of science by consensus, a key tenet of the climate-alarmist crowd.
“What is correct in science is not determined by consensus, but by experiment and observations. Historically, scientific consensuses have often turned out to be wrong. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus,” the brief points out.
“The frequent assertion that there is a consensus behind the idea that there is an impending disaster from climate change is not how the validity of science is determined.”
The brief also attacks the idea of peer review — at least when it comes to climate science.
“Peer review can be helpful in many areas of science, but it does not determine scientific validity,” the brief states. “Alas, peer review of the climate literature is a joke. It is pal review, not peer review. The resulting present situation violates the ancient principle ‘no man shall be a judge in his own cause.'”
The brief argues that a preliminary injunction against the so-called Social Cost of Carbon rules issued by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, which was in place for just 33 days prior to being removed by a federal appeals court, should be reinstated since the social-cost rules completely ignore the benefits of the greenhouse gasses.
“Two of the three models [used to determine social costs] only computed the social costs of CO2 and excluded data on the enormous social benefits of CO2,” the brief points out. “It is like promoting the theory the world is flat by only considering observations as far as the eye can see, excluding all the evidence the world is round.”
Attacking carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gasses in this way could lead to a disastrous outcome for the planet, according to Happer and Lindzen.
“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that fossil fuels and CO2 provide enormous social benefits for the poor, people worldwide, future generations and the United States, and therefore it would be disastrous to reduce or eliminate them.”
It really shouldn’t take two distinguished scientists to point that out. Most of us learned about photosynthesis in elementary school. The climate-hysteric community — who largely inspired Biden’s Executive Order 13990 — must have missed those days in school.
