by Gregory Wrightstone, CO2 Coalition Executive Director
As appearing on RealClearEnergy.com
Smearing coal has become a marketing strategy of a natural gas industry that embraces pseudoscientific views of coal combustion as being hazardous.
In so doing, gas supporters give credence to a fallacious regulatory regime of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which erroneously classifies carbon dioxide as a pollutant and assigns health effects to low-level pollution without scientific proof. To boot, a false representation of coal, oil and natural gas as environmental bogeymen is perpetuated…
EPA has long trafficked in data manipulation and falsehood about the supposed health effects of particulate matter, which would be the carrier of chemical compounds into people’s lungs, according to Steve Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of “Scare Pollution: Why and how to fix the EPA.”
“The bottom line is that the claim that particulate matter causes death is the most demonstrable science fraud of our time,” says Milloy, a lawyer with a master’s degree in health sciences and biostatistics. “Despite fearmongering for 30 years about millions of deaths, EPA — and nobody else — has ever presented a single dead body.”
Since the 1990s, Milloy has sparred with the EPA over its assertion that particulate matter measuring 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5) is life threatening. PM2.5 was identified as a dangerous pollutant by EPA’s environmental extremists to shut down the coal industry, he says.
