EPA: Corrupt From The GetGo.

From the very beginning, politics produced travesty at the EPA and affected the entire globe; it is institutionalized, the legacy of Ruckelshaus:

"First thing out of the box, newly minted EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus -- a respected attorney and excellent manager -- faced a world-changing decision: whether to ban DDT, the miracle insect killer that wiped out malaria in America.

Ruckelshaus inherited authority over pesticides from the Agriculture Department, so the fledgling EPA's first order of business was the DDT issue.

EPA Administrative Law Judge Edmund Sweeney held testimony hearings for seven months, concluding that DDT “does not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife,” “is not a carcinogenic hazard to man" and that "there is a present need for the essential uses of DDT."

Ruckelshaus did not attend a single hearing or read Sweeney's report, but he clearly heard from readers of Rachel Carson's anti-pesticide mind-killer Silent Spring, from the old-line bird-protecting National Audubon Society and the new (1967) Environmental Defense Fund.

Carson lied, and lied unscientifically but emotionally, demonstrating the actual mindset of the Greenie-Leftists.

Ruckelshaus was a member of Audubon and later of the Environmental Defense Fund. He overruled Sweeney's decision and issued the ban, asserting that DDT was a “potential human carcinogen,” thus beginning EPA’s rogue disregard of court decisions — empire-building on the march.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to ask Ruckelshaus face-to-face about his decision: Was it political? He told me, “Yes, it was completely political. It was the right thing to do.”

Millions of Third World victims of malaria would disagree if the Republican DDT ban hadn’t killed them.

I contacted Alan Moghissi, who has a doctoral degree in physical chemistry, for his assessment of the EPA's bipartisan problems. He was there at the EPA's beginning -- a veritable charter member -- and has become legendary as a regulator for demanding accountability of the science used by policy makers. He served as EPA's principal science adviser for radiation and hazardous materials and as manager of the agency's Health and Environmental Risk Analysis Program, and has since been in high positions with several universities.

He developed the “Best Available Science” concept and its “metrics for evaluation of scientific claims,” which are notably absent from today's EPA: open-mindedness, skepticism, universal scientific principles, transparency and reproducibility.

Moghissi praised Ruckelshaus for establishing seven fundamental principles for running the EPA (which the boss preached but didn’t practice), including “Scientific decisions must be free of non-scientific influences.” If today’s EPA “climate scientists” had to obey that, they’d be jobless.

Most dismal, the Ruckelshaus dictum that “Governmental actions must be based on sound science” has degenerated into “noisy science.”"

It is certainly arguable that the Greens' politics has killed more people than any other single human contribution. They still persist, and are morally arrogant in their messiahism. They infect more than just the EPA, including the BLM, National Park Service, all energy decisions, and on and on. AGW fits perfectly into their schematic for government control of the Herd, with exceptions for the filthy rich who buy credits to enable their private jets and mansions (Al Gore and other 0.00001 percenter Leftist politicians). And the fight against drought and pest resistant crop foods for the starving nations is another indicator of the anti-science and anti-human traits of the now-powerful Greens (contrast the DDT ban and resistant crop fight to the claims of humanism with regard to salvation from AGW). It's just about political and ideological power, nothing more, certainly nothing scientific or humanitarian. Thanks, Wm Ruckelshaus.

There's more at the link.

More Green Fails (And Pathological Altruism)

The unintended consequences of dictatorial Greenism keep piling up, especially onto birds, bats and virgin plains.

"recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with "singed wings" around several California solar energy facilities.

It happens that many of California's solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of "the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds" called "the Pacific Flyway."

Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky.

Others "feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight." The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act."

And as for corn in your gas tank,

"ROSCOE, S.D. (AP) — Robert Malsam nearly went broke in the 1980s when corn was cheap. So now that prices are high and he can finally make a profit, he's not about to apologize for ripping up prairieland to plant corn.

Across the Dakotas and Nebraska, more than 1 million acres of the Great Plains are giving way to corn fields as farmers transform the wild expanse that once served as the backdrop for American pioneers."

You'd think the elite greenies would think this stuff through. But like banning incandescent light bulbs in favor of mercury-laden flourescents, it's the initial narrative that counts, not the consequences.

Addendum:
There is now a term for this: Pathological Altruism, which is the term Barbara Oakley, Oakland University, has used for misguided ventures.

"She defines pathological altruism “as behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.” In her study Oakley explores the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of empathy and altruism and how they can go wrong. It turns out that pathological altruism is a pervasive problem affecting public policy."