Guarantees Article I, Section 27, of the Pennsylvania Constitution: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
However, Article I, Section 27, overwhelmingly adopted by the people of Pennsylvania in 1971, does not guarantee that “The State” can destroy the economy of the commonwealth, make electricity so expensive that it returns Pennsylvania to the Dark Ages and force huddled masses of Keystone Staters around fires in steel barrels to stay warm (and then, you can make book, likely, at considerable risk of fines and/or arrest from the eco gendarmes).
Surely, this is pure jest, you say. Hyperbole is being employed in the extreme, you tut-tut. Not at all. For if the ecocratic “booboisie” (pronounced BOOB-wah-zee) of H.L. Mencken coinage – the rank ignorant and definitional stupid – have their way and win the day, the aforementioned, and worse, will come to pass.
In fact, it’s already coming to pass.
To wit, and as the Post-Gazette reports:
“Pennsylvania must act to require industries across the economy to cut — and pay for — climate-warming pollution they release, a group led by prominent state environmental attorneys said in a legal demand to state regulators on Thursday.
“The coalition wants to compel Pennsylvania’s environmental rule-makers to create a program that puts a price and shrinking cap on allowable greenhouse gas emissions that would apply to a broad swath of pollution sources, including power plants, coal mines, factories and transportation fuels.”
Talk about a shakedown cruise. That’s a tax that only an act of the state Legislature can enact, as per a now-vacated Commonwealth Court ruling, vacated only after the state’s appeal to the Supreme Court become moot when the Shapiro administration tucked tail and ran away from the deleterious and unconstitutional Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).
The P-G goes on to report the legal beagles contention, as incontrovertible fact, that “Pennsylvanians are bearing the effects of a changing climate, including hotter temperatures, intensifying storms and worsening flooding.”
Which is buncombe, the pure talking-point buncombe of eco-sophists.
Ancillary to the ecocratic havoc hustlers’ legal threats and climate misrepresentations was a recent op-ed in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star by a retired executive of a clean air group.
He also claimed (again cue the hustlers’ talking points here) that “Pennsylvanians are increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change. Communities are dealing with stronger and more frequent storms, worsening flooding, and more intense heat waves.”
And just as bad, he believes Pennsylvania should follow the example of cap-and-trade-implemented California. That’s where, according to the Cato Institute, facilities subjected to the regimen “increased toxic emissions by 75 percent on average between 2013 and 2018—the first five years of the program.”
The former clean air official also would like Pennsylvania to emulate Washington State. But as The Washington Policy Center reported just last month, a state report of purported CO2 reductions “shows 86 percent of Washington’s claimed climate benefits are probably fake.”
He also touts the New Jersey experience where, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the retirements of baseload power plants have led to electricity rate spikes – 22 percent higher just last summer and 50 percent higher over five years. The cause? A double whopper of a whammy: more emissions regulations and more “green”-energy subsidies, The Journal details.
New Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s “remedy” for the crisis? “(P)rice controls that will reduce energy supply,” the Journal reminds.
Brilliant! Break out those fire-filled steel barrels so Garden Staters can stay warm in the coming rolling blackouts.
Oh, and by the way, had Pennsylvania joined RGGI, the CO2 reductions would have been negligible.
And on and on and on we could go.
There is a solution here to the basic pollution question. It’s called letting the marketplace and innovation work. (Think of how the conversion to natural gas – a fossil fuel once favored by ecocrats but now spurned –from coal markedly has reduced carbon emissions.)
The solution is called not creating fake marketplaces to redistribute incomes and wealth to solve problems that don’t exist to the extent claimed. And not creating fake consequences to scare the public into accepting unworkable schemes.
The solution also is called common sense that serves the commonweal, not common confidence men pimping for their social reengineering designs.
The bottom line is that Article I, Section 27, of the Pennsylvania Constitution is not a suicide pact. Its mandates indeed can be met, in spirit and in letter. Just leave the by-choice booboisie schemers out of it.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
