Cooper Pushes Big Government Climate Change Hysteria with Executive Order

RALEIGH – Little more than a week from midterm elections Gov. Roy Cooper reached into his grab-bag of Leftist narratives Monday and pulled out an executive order pushing the man-made climate change fantasy. The order seeks to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

Cooper made the announcement at a solar farm, fittingly, and parroted the same misleading talking points the climate change activists have been regurgitating for years.

“We know that there is a consensus among scientists that man-made pollution hurts our crops, wildlife, lands and water, and that greenhouse gases intensify climate change. This means sea level rise, stronger storms and erratic weather, from droughts to floods. … It’s time for North Carolinians to do our part and take action.”

There is so much wrong with this statement that it’d take a dissertation to unpack it all, but suffice it to say that despite a that oft repeated (and thoroughly debunked) consensus, there is no confirmed evidence that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to intensifying climate change and sea level rise and has nothing at all to do with erratic weather, storms, droughts, or floods.

The last half of that fear mongering and inaccurate statement, citing sever weather as evidence of climate change, is something climate change activists vocally denounced when skeptics cited colder than average weather to poke holes in the man-made warming argument. However, now Leftists use Hurricane Florence and other recent storms as “proof” that climate change is real and it’s our fault.

That’s ridiculous, of course. Even the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the much celebrated and scandalized cohort of politically motivated and manipulative scientists bent on scaring the policymakers into passing strict environmental regulations, admits in it’s latest report that there has been NO increase in the number or intensity of hurricanes in the last 50 years. Over that last 100 years these storms and other natural disasters have even been DECREASING while CO2 emissions increase.

Never mind facts, though, because Cooper has a political narrative to push that depicts him as a brave protector of our environment.

And Cooper gave himself a head start, too. The executive order calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from their 2005 levels, getting at least 80,000 zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) on the road and reducing state building energy consumption by 40 percent, all by 2025.

A 40 percent reduction from 2005 levels? This is a sleight of hand because emissions have already been reduced by nearly 30 percent from 2005 levels, according to Cooper’s own head of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality.

Beyond that ploy, how does Cooper plan on getting 80,000 zero-emission vehicles on the road in the next six or seven years? No doubt it involves a healthy amount of Big Government bureaucracies that will suggest different ways to pillage the taxpayers of the Old North State in the name of fighting climate change.

Case in point, the executive order creates the North Carolina Climate Change Interagency Council, which will ‘focus on creating and implementing strategies to reduce negative environmental impacts.’ Also known as taxes and subsidies. The body should be called the Don Quixote Council for Dragon Slaying Strategies.

And to top it all off, Cooper claimed that an expensive and futile government sponsored effort to combat man-made climate change will benefit the economy.

“Not only is this the right thing to do environmentally, it’s the smart thing to do,” he said. “The Clean Energy Industry creates more good paying jobs for our people.”

This is misleading to say the least. The ‘Clean Energy Industry’ certainly offers good jobs to some people, but they come at the expense of everyone else that pays taxes and suffers under oppressive environmental regulations. He cites the solar industry in North Carolina as an example, but we all know that the only reason solar has grown so much in this state is because of lawmakers legislated subsidies, tax breaks, and mandates to support it. Republicans on Jones Street have lacked the spine to get rid of these laws, for the most part. The idea that government subsidies for clean energy, or any other industry, are good for the economy on a net basis is just plain false.

Cooper closed his remarks with a thick layer of alarmism.

“Today with this executive order, I’m challenging all of us elected officials, business leaders, stakeholders, community members, the environmental community, all to work together on solutions for one of the most pressing problems of our time. Our communities, our economy, our health and our future depend on it.”

Got that? Submit to our delusional man made climate change policies or we’re all going to go poor and die.

While the executive order does not have any policy making powers outside of the executive agencies, the significance of this order should not be underestimated. In creating a bureaucracy around climate change initiatives, Cooper insures that Big Government will be forcing this garbage down our throats for years to come.