Federal Judge Blocks Ridiculous, Key Component of Biden 'Climate Change' Scheme

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

“Climate Change.” Let’s kick this sucker off with a trip down Global Warming Memory Lane, shall we?

•  Al Gore ridiculously predicted in 2009: “The North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 because of man-made global warming.”

• The first United Nations environment director claimed half a century ago that we had just 10 years left, and the then-head of the IPCC insisted in 2007 that we had just five years left.

• The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August 2021 released its latest climate report, leading Secretary-General António Guterres to histrionically call the findings a “code red for humanity,” and that “we can only avert catastrophe by acting in the next couple of months.”

• And this, from noted climatologist and all-around knower of everything, Socialist Barbie™ Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-LOON), in January 2019: “We’re like… the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

I don’t know whether or not “the world is gonna end” in “like” now, nine years or not. But I do know if you fact-check the crap above AOC’s ridiculous alarmist nonsense, you’ll find it’s all, yeah, crap. 

This brings us to Mumbling Joe Biden™ and his “vaunted” Climate Change Initiative.

Specifically, a United States District Court judge on Friday blocked Biden’s January 2021 executive order that ridiculously factored in the mostly-contrived “social cost” of carbon emissions when creating rules regulating pollution, as reported by Fox News.

So what is the “social cost” of the “existential threat to mankind,” you ask?  Let’s go to the inimitable Stanford economics professor, Marshall Burke for the answer:

The social cost of carbon is the single most important number for thinking about climate change. When we emit a ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it sticks around for a while and causes warming, affecting human outcomes. The social cost of carbon is the total damage that an additional ton of CO2 has on outcomes, converted into dollars.

Given the left’s strict adherence to all things science — except when they ignore science in deference to their political narrative (see: “all-things COVID”) — does the above explanation of “social cost” sound like exact science to you? Me, neither.

Anyway, Judge James Cain sided with Republican attorneys general from energy-producing states who rightly claimed Biden’s handlers’ attempt to raise the cost estimate of carbon emissions (catch that?) threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production.

The judge issued an injunction that bars the administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. Needless to say, the wise among us know exactly what happens to every “excess” tax dollar fleeced from hardworking Americans by the Democrat Party in one form or another: wealth redistribution.

Cain’s ruling stated, as transcribed by Fox:

Plaintiff States have sufficiently identified the kinds of harms to support injunctive relief.

Moreover, the Court finds that the Plaintiff States have made a clear showing of an injury-in-fact, and that such injury ‘cannot be undone through monetary remedies.

The Court agrees that the public interest and balance of equities weigh heavily in favor of granting a preliminary injunction.

“Injury-in-fact,” as defined by the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute:

The plaintiff must have suffered an “injury in fact,” meaning that the injury is of a legally protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent.

There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct brought before the court.

It must be likely, rather than speculative, that a favorable decision by the court will redress the injury.

In other words, Joe, nice try — but no cigar.

Biden and his handlers were unavailable for immediate comment.

The bottom line:

The quintessential question: Is “climate change” real? Of course.

Earth’s climate has undergone changes — many or most of them cyclical — from its origin. Ice ages have come, ices ages have gone. And come, and gone, again. Other examples abound. Is “man” responsible for any changes to the world’s climate? Sure. But to what degree? And have any of those changes been permanent? Not to mention, cataclysmic, “existential threat to our times” stuff?

Remember the Deepwater Horizon? On April 20, 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, operating in the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded and sank, resulting in the death of 11 workers on the rig and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations. The climate loons hysterically told us that marine and plant life in the Gulf of Mexico would all but cease to exist.

Now, 12 years later, how did those “Armageddon-like predictions turn out?

Google it. As if you don’t already know the answer.