Cross posted at Daily Kos
Is Ken Cuccinelli moving to the political center to win the Virginia governor’s race? Um…no.
Quite to the contrary, our Ayatollah General is once again petitioning the courts to validate his favorite climate change conspiracy theories. Just last week, he asked the Supreme Court to throw out the US EPA’s scientific finding that climate change represents a threat to human health.
If he wrote that he is filing his petition out of concern for his fossil fuel industry donors, who may have to sell a yacht or two if oil, gas and coal stocks sink, I might give him an A for honesty. No such luck — his rationale (or more accurately, irrationale) is that thousands of scientists worldwide falsified their data as part of the biggest conspiracy since the faked moon landing.
David Doniger of NRDC demolishes this shoddy edifice in his blog by playing the dirty trick of quoting the last court — the US Court of Appeals in Washington — to throw this bum and his bull-hockey out on the street:
State and Industry Petitioners assert that EPA improperly “delegated” its judgment to the IPCC, USGCRP, and NRC by relying on these assessments of climate-change science. … This argument is little more than a semantic trick. EPA did not delegate, explicitly or otherwise, any decision-making to any of those entities. EPA simply did here what it and other decisionmakers often must do to make a science-based judgment: it sought out and reviewed existing scientific evidence to determine whether a particular finding was warranted.[…]Relying again upon substantial scientific evidence, EPA determined that anthropogenically induced climate change threatens both public health and public welfare.[…]State Petitioners have not, as they assert, uncovered a “pattern” of flawed science. Only two of the errors they point out seem to be errors at all, and EPA relied on neither in making the Endangerment Finding.
But undeterred, our Kook presses onward. If you feel any temptation to praise him for his doggedness, please note that most conspiracy theorists tend to be just as persistent. That is because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, INSANE.
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