Texas AG Candidate Promises More Lawsuits–Loser?

I have expressed my disappointment with business, industry legal attempts to push back on EPA overreach.
You might ask, well waddauthink about the State Attorneys General? Sorry to say–not much.

The AGs and Lawyers in general have an incurable disability when they go into war with the US EPA on toxicology and epidemiology claims and proposed life saving regulations, they don’t wanna talk science and they are reluctant to challenge scientists.
That, in my experience is peculiar to lawyers in public sector litigation, since have met personal injury and toxic tort lawyers who absolutely love the science wars. And they are good at them. I have a friend Gary Baise, who represents Agricultural Interests among other things in EPA regulatory disputes who loves the science issues and the disputes that are resolved on the basis of admissibility or reliability of scientific claims by EPA regulators.
Greg Abbott, AG for Texas and now candidate for Governor, has been suing the EPA now on many occasions (he claims more than 25 lawsuits on EPA overreach) mostly about air pollution regs promulgated under the Clean Air Act. Dan Branch, candidate to replace Abbott,promises more of the same. A number of other red state AGs are on board to fight the EPA overreach.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/resistance_782747.html
Now, in addition to air pollution regs, mostly focused on small particles, there is also the carbon dioxide endangerment problem and a US Supreme Court authorization to the EPA to declare a vital and beneficial gas a pollutant on the tenuous body of science that some warming will occur because of carbon dioxide and it will be harmful.
The endangerment finding was in response to Blue State AGs’ lawsuit, is, my friends, a real stretch on the tendrils of science. A strong argument can be made that warming would be good for the planet and the human race, not harmful and there is no ideal temp or level of ambient carbon dioxide. History shows that warming and more carbon dioxide improved life on the planet in the past, for example, so the EPA says that warming and more carbon dioxide are harmful?
Many years ago I contacted the lead attorney for the Texas AG on one of the first suits Abbott’s office filed on air pollution overreach by US EPA.
I called him because his brief to the federal court was bound to lose, since it repeated the same tired old constitutional, economics and property rights arguments. Guess what–the brief had not a single worthwhile argument about the Junk Science that is the US EPA research on human effects of particulate air pollution and their assertion that they would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year if they instituted the proposed air regulations.
One of the silliest parts of the Texas AG brief was an apologia about how Texas had really been good about trying to cooperate with EPA impositions and regs and Texas had really been compliant, following EPA orders on air pollution in the required State Implementation Plans (SIPs).
The brief to the Federal court by the AG essentially ceded the ground to the US EPA on what the Clean Air Act (CAA) allowed, and adopted the US EPA position that the CAA obligated the US EPA to make the air “clean,” not realizing that the Clean Air Act is not about clean air, it’s about safe air, it is not possible to have clean air. The human effects research is critical to the question of identifying air pollutants for toxicity and proposing appropriate mitigation of that toxicity.
But these are lawyers and they don’t know from science.
Gee Mr. Crocodile we sure hope you’ll see how we’ve been good.
Says the Texas AG brief, US EPA, you’re killin’ our energy and business/industry competitiveness with these burdens. Can’t you slow down on the tyranny? Take the heavy boot off our neck–maybe just hit us a little lighter and delay some of the really onerous regs?
Sub rosa they’re signaling–we know you EPA people are right and you’re trying to make the air clean, and we support clean air too. Like GHW Bush–I’m a Greenie too, really I am. You might recall GHW Bush, incurable Yalie and RINO, declared he was the enviro president.)
And of course the US EPA response is–no matter–we’re saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Full speed ahead, boot stays on the neck.
My point made to the lead attorney was that is what they are claiming is nonsense, there are no dead bodies to count at all, certainly not the hundreds of thousands they claim and they are using unreliable science to produce their claims of deaths as their justification for the boot on the neck.
Milloy and I were involved with David Schnare of American Traditions Institute in a lawsuit to stop human experimentation with small particulate exposures.
US EPA scientists explained in declarations to the Federal Court in Arlington VA, under penalty of perjury, that they were involved in a 10 year plus project of small particle exposure human experiments, exposing subjects to what EPA says are unsafe levels of small particles because, as Dr. Robert Devlin (3rd declarant in the link below), explains in his declaration, the epidemiological studies don’t prove up the US EPA claim of hundreds of thousands of deaths from small particle (also called fine particle) exposure. They need something better to establish toxicity of small particles.

Click to access 14-1-us-declarations-in-opp-to-tro.pdf

But Milloy and I knew that and we said it a bunch of times. No calls no emails from the private sector or the AGs.
Article by Milloy and Dunn Environmental protection agency’s air pollution research: unethical and illegal.
http://www.jpands.org/jpands1704.htm
and an essay by Dunn at American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/epas_unethical_air_pollution_experiments.html
http://junkscience.com/2013/11/16/epa-hearing-exercise/
http://junkscience.com/2014/02/20/lawyer-losers-who-work-for-our-side-rich-losers-but-still-losers/
That young man never answered my many requests to educate him on the US EPA junk science claims about air pollution deaths. Now he has moved on to a private firm and he works for business and industry. Who knows, he might have been a part of the expensive and pathetic team I discussed last week that represented business and industry. . Anyway he would answer my calls or emails–he was so important at the age of 30 something and he sure as hell didn’t want to talk science.
Wanna know why–because I think most college and law school educated kids today think that capitalism is ruining the planet–in their heart of hearts they think US EPA is saving us all, cause after all they see smog–and assume any air pollution can’t be good.
It’s like the inane comment of Charles Krauthammer, who said he just couldn’t imagine that air pollution wasn’t harmful some way.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371639/myth-settled-science-charles-krauthammer
Krauthammer said “I repeat: I’m not a global-warming believer. I’m not a global-warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30, or 50 years are white-coated propagandists. Good, but you conceded something Charles–when you said “spewing tons of carbon dioxide” since you don’t know the basic science, since you are a man of letters and social studies.
That is why a psychiatrist shouldn’t be able to comment on real science, just the social sciences. I doubt if Krauthammer doesn’t understand that “spewing” is pejorative, and at the same time he doesn’t know–a hundred dollars says he doesn’t know, how many tons it would take to make carbon dioxide levels that we have had on this planet that were very good for plant life.
And I also bet a thousand that he doesn’t know that carbon dioxide is a trace gas on the planet at 0.04 % of the ambient air by volume, around 400 parts per million, 0.0004 compared to nitrogen at close to 80 % and oxygen at close to 20 %.
I can say that with confidence because most non climate people don’t know. When Surveyed the physicians I work with none of them knew the ambient level of Carbon Dioxide even though they all know the level of exhaled Carbon Dioxide, 4% because they know human respiratory parameters.
I will also bet the trifecta, that Dr. K doesn’t know that water vapor is much more important as a green house gas but it has cooling and mitigating effects too, derived from its heat loss or gain to the environment when it changes state from liquid to vapor and gives off or absorbs 540 calories per cc when it absorbs heat as it vaporizes and rises or gives off heat as it condenses and falls as precipitation.
Well here is an essay about the conservative candidate for Attorney General to replace Greg Abbott who is running for Governor. I met Greg Abbott at a barbecue place in Brownwood, but I couldn’t get his lead attorney on his first EPA lawsuits to return a call or even look at the science info I sent him when I read his pathetic brief that raised no science issues.
You might say, well John you just don’t have the political chops or contacts. Or maybe you could say that their heart isn’t in it?
I know this that I have well-connected science literate people inside and outside Texas Government, and they can’t get an audience with Abbott’s office or lawyers on their lawsuits. They don’t even consult with the people in government who know the human effects science and the junk science skeletons in the EPA closet.
Recall a previous discussion and the work that Milloy and I have done. Why no calls, or emails? Indeed, maybe because lawyers don’t like science and would prefer a respectable showing and loss–since they have no interest in really winning?
They, like the oil companies and business and industry, just don’t have the courage of their convictions but they wanna got through the motions and assure their supporters they’re doing their best–sure they are–but they are disabled, they are afraid of the science bogeyman. They are stopped in their tracks when some EPA science whore gets going, claiming the reliability of their epidemiology and toxicology.
I would say–not so fast,let’s talk epi and tox–from the beginning and show me your reliable science that allows you to panic the public about the ambient air or water or whether your scary warming prediction means we should turn our economic future on its head.
And then the fun begins–examining the data and the methods of these EPA science hucksters of panic.