HS 288 - Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA with Steve Milloy

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Steve Malloy to the show. He is publisher of Junk Science and Junk Science commentator on Fox News. He's part of the Trump EPA transition team, author of several books including Scare why and how to Fix the epa. Steve, welcome. How are you?

Hey, Jason, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's good to have you. And you were on the show a few years ago, as I recall. We were trying to kind of figure that out as we were talking off air. If so, welcome back. It's good to have you.

Thank you very much.

With 3,000 interviews under my belt, it's a little hard to remember sometimes, but. So you're on the Trump EPA transition team. That's interesting. And, you know, a lot of people don't know this, so I just want to point it out that the epa, a lot of people on the left don't know this. The EPA was founded by a Republican, by Richard Nixon. What has it turned into over the decades? Has it been an oppressive force or has it been a good force? I mean, you know, kind of give us a little overview before we dive into what you're doing with the Trump team.

So Richard Nixon, what he did, he created the epa. What he did was take environmental tasks, jobs, duties that were already being done by other federal agencies. He consolidated them into one place. Why did he do that? He did it to placate the anti war left at the time. Did it work? No, because they handed him out of office shortly thereafter. So EPA has since grown into this regulatory behemoth. In 1970, when EPA was formed, you know, air wasn't the cleanest, waters weren't the cleanest, some of the rivers caught on fire. But, you know, once people started to pay attention to the environment, we had largely solved all those problems by about 1990, which is coincidentally when I started working on EPA issues. Since then, though, since 1990, EPA has just engaged in wholesale regulatory overreach. It has ballooned into this 8 billion a year behemoth with 16,000 employees who are, more often than not ideologically aligned with the left. And many of their actions are done to expand government control over the economy. If they get your business in their crosshairs and they target like they did with the coal industry, they may very well destroy it. And I'm hoping that our new president is going to come in and he has promised to rein in the epa.

So if Nixon hadn't formed the epa, and now I'm asking you to speculate, of course, the Environmental Protection Agency, would all of those different agencies have been. Would that have been better for the world or the country, or would it have been worse? I mean, sometimes consolidation makes sense, sometimes it doesn't, you know, because you take away local control, you become more bureaucratic and you become more potentially oppressive if you're more bureaucratic. But I don't know, you know, like, just speculate with me for a moment. What would have been better for the country in the world?

I can't imagine that there would have been a better outcome. The American left has figured out how to use the environment to achieve its political ends. And whether that's through multiple agencies, I guess it was probably easier for them having everything one, one giant agency, which is what they've created with epa.

So you only have to lobby one agency, so it's a little more efficient.

And control one agency.

That's an even better way to put it. So it's interesting. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't be in favor of a good environment? I mean, who doesn't want clean air, who doesn't want clean water? Of course, everybody wants these things. But the way it's portrayed in the media, certainly and in the political realm, is that the Republican side of the aisle or the right in general, they don't care about the environment. They just want to just go rape the land, ruin the world, pollute the rivers. You know, all of this stuff, and the left is so compassionate, and they want to make sure we have a clean environment and so forth. And the interesting thing I see about that is that the argument, argument, when you boil down any of these arguments about the environment, and I've been in many debates about it at the end of the funnel, if you will, of the argument, it always comes to humans are the scourge of the earth. They need to go, we need to reduce the population. But I don't see any of these self proclaimed environmentalists committing suicide. I don't see them not having children. They're having children. This argument is. It's just kind of framed the wrong way, I think. You know, I think the left has been allowed to frame the debate and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

You raise a lot of great points and each one is worthy of a show, I'm sure. I'll try to answer some of your questions.

All right, you got like three minutes.

So, yes, the left, the environmentalists and the left, they always try to position themselves as if they exist on some higher moral plane than the rest of us. And the rest of us left to our own devices, we'd be living like in China. And I don't think anything could be further from the truth. The reality is that to have a clean environment, and we have the cleanest environment on the planet, you have to be wealthy enough to afford it. The American left does not outdo the Chinese in terms of its authoritarian impulses. Yet in China, where they are comparatively poorer, their environment is terrible. So wealth is a prerequisite to a clean environment. To the extent that the left has been strangling our economy, making us poorer, they're actually hurting the environment. And the environment is a difficult issue to talk about because while everybody cares about it, nobody wants to learn anything about it. And this is especially true with Republican politicians because with them, the environment has become like the third rail of politics. You know, if an environmental group attacks an environmental Republican politician on the environment, they just run away. They just don't want to have to deal with it. And it's really unfortunate. And you know, that you have people like me. We are trying to fight the left. And President Trump represents this really unique opportunity. He was the only Republican presidential candidate, the only one who vowed to rein in the unlawful, out of control epa. And that alone, that alone got him my support and the support of many people that work in my field.

Yeah, well, Trump is obviously a very controversial figure. How bad is this? You know, maybe give us some examples, like, I'm sure there are some calculations and studies on the cost of all the environmental regulation or maybe all the unnecessary environmental regulation, you know, or. And who knows? You know, that's a point of opinion obviously as to how much we need, but we do need some regulation. Right? You know, how much is it costing the economy? How much is it costing individuals? How much is it costing business? You know, what are we losing because of it?

Well, I Mean, you'll see various estimates. It costs the average family, you know, maybe $10,000 a year. You know, some of the EPA's most egregious overregulation, like the ozone, its recent ozone rules passed during, under Obama. I mean, they're estimated to have compliance costs of a trillion dollars over a generation and not break, not improve public health, not avoid one single, you know, asthma case, not improve the environment. This is all cost. And, you know, compliance costs are only a very small part of how EPA hurts our economy. Because there are a lot, you know, states take EPA standards, they're responsible for implementing them, and so they weigh development decisions based on, well, what do we think this might do to the air? Is it going to take us out of compliance with epa? And if it does so, then we don't want to do that because EPA can take away our highway, our money. So there's lots of trillion dollars in compliance costs for one rule, but trillions more in lost economic opportunities. Now, a good specific example of how devastating EPA rules are is with the coal industry during the Obama administration. President Obama's war on coal wiped out 90% of the equity in the coal industry. A lot of people like to point to natural gas industry and fracking. Say, oh, that's the reason. No, that's false. The reason is Obama's war on coal. Because what it did was fracking made natural gas abundant and cost competitive with coal. But what put the pressure on the utilities to switch from coal to gas is Obama's war on coal.

In all objectivity here, do we need to switch from coal? Is coal the old world? And do we need to. Does green energy work? Does it even work? You know, and I don't really know the answer. Solar is obviously very expensive, but the cost has come down. You know, I mean.

Well, it's a good thing you're talking to me. Okay. Does green energy work? It physically can work on some scale. Is it ready for utility scale?

No.

Is it cost effective? No. Nowhere is it cost effective. Wind and solar only exist because of mandates and subsidies, taxpayer subsidies. So is coal old world? No. Coal is the number one source of energy in the world. Without coal, billions would die.

Right. But if the government, and, you know, this is the Keynesian, I hate the central planning Keynesian philosophy from a philosophical perspective, for sure. So just understand that. But sometimes is it possible that when the government sort of, you know, gets its nose in something and it pushes something, ultimately when you push it into the market, you eventually drive costs down? You know, maybe it would just take a lot longer for the free market to adopt that stuff. And, you know, sometimes a little nudge is maybe appropriate.

No, but how does that work? I mean, first off, with wind and solar, you know, you have to have all the fossil fuel backups anyway because, well, solar is only good for, you know, even in the best areas, a few hours a day definitely doesn't work during rain or the, or at nighttime. Wind, you know, the wind has to blow. And on the, on the days when you have peak load, peak demand for electricity, the wind's not really blowing. I mean, these technologies are kind of a disaster. You know, if you're, if you are afraid of carbon dioxide and you don't like fossil fuels for some reason. Well, you know, the green should have been for nuclear power, but of course they didn't want that either.

Yeah, the nuclear power is by far the safest, most efficient, most cost effective thing we've got today.

Well, there's. Yeah, I've got to stop you right there because I mean, there's nothing that's not safe about coal and gas. I mean, all this, you know, environmentalists have completely polluted our minds. That's what's been polluted. They polluted our minds with these notions, the notion that, you know, the air is killing us, the air is killing nobody. That's what my book Scare Pollution is all about.

Well, tell us about that. I mean, you know, is it, is it because coal has become so much cleaner or what?

My book is about the $600 million in scientific fraud, and I mean the word fraud that EPA has conducted with its war on coal. EPA claims that, you know, the air outside blue sky air kills almost 600,000Americans a year. So EPA says that, you know, regular outdoor air causes one in four deaths in America. I have spent the last 26 years working on this issue. That is pure fraud. The story is in scare pollution. EPA has used that claim. That's what fueled its war on coal. That's what has fueled its global warming rules. That assumption has fueled its ozone rule, which the trillion dollar rule we were talking about before. It's mega science fraud that has been used to devastating effect on our economy.

Okay, so tell us about the fraud a little bit. I mean, you know, what's, what's the backup for that?

Well, so EPA's claim relies on a couple lines of scientific data that it has been hiding from the public and Congress for 20 years. Okay? I mean, Congress has subpoenaed. Congress has gone to the extent of subpoenaing EPA for this data. And EPA has not produced, has refused to produce it. This data has been put together with taxpayer dollars, but EPA refuses to produce it so that we can have, you know, independent analysts look at it.

Right. Well, there's certainly a lot of talk and evidence about these various environmental groups manipulating carbon data. You know, the whole global warming debate.

Yeah, well, this is, I mean, this is more fundamental than, I mean, these are, you know, EPA hires universities, scientists to produce the quote, unquote science that it wants, and then it hires the same scientists to review their own work. I mean, imagine you could go to school and check your own work. You'd be a valedictorian.

Right?

Well, that's how EPA does it. EPA has conducted illegal experiments on human beings. During the 2000s, EPA used 10 year old children spraying diesel exhaust up their noses to see what would happen. This is an agency that is out of, is unbelievable, but it's true. The agency is out of control.

Where do we go from here? What do we do about this? How do we fix it?

Well, we have new president. The new president has promised to rein in the out of control epa. I served on the EPA transition team, so I helped put together the plans for doing that. Mr. Trump has appointed Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma Attorney General who spent the last eight years suing EPA for its, you know, regulatory overreach. So the guy that's going to be in charge of EPA understands the problem. And then really all we need to do is, you know, implement the solution.

And the solution is?

Well, the solution is to basically devolve environmental protection back to the state. You know, it's no longer 1970 where the only state that had a Department of Environmental Protection, environmental Protection was California. Now every state has a Department of Environmental Protection and they're quite good at it. As a matter of fact, the last two EPA administrators have both admitted to Congress that about 85% of environmental protection is done in the states. Now, while there still is a role for a federal EPA or some federal body, that role should be limited to interstate issues, international issues and national issues like pesticide registration, which don't, you know, make any sense to be handled on a state by state basis.

The interesting thing about it is the argument you're going to get from that is, well, you know, look at the environment. It crosses state lines. Well, I would argue that it also crosses oceans. I mean, you know, people have this crazy false belief that, oh, you know, let them make all our stuff in China and pollute the environment there. Sinfully polluted it's disgusting what. What goes on there. And. And, you know, that won't affect our era. You know, I would remind you, it was a Democrat in a famous speech. It was John F. Kennedy. We all breathe the same air. Yes, we do. And that same air circulates all around the planet.

Yeah. This is probably a good time to mention the fact that, you know, the reason that people think solar and wind technology is so cheap is because it all comes from China, where it's made with slave, you know, essentially slave labor and little concern for the environment. If you've ever seen the mines where the Chinese get the rare earth metals that are used in solar and wind technology, it's appalling. If that happened in the United States, those people would go to jail.

Yeah. So the idea of outsourcing this manufacturing to China and having, you know, really strict environmental relations regulations here is a completely flawed idea, because the same environment China does, it does not stay put. Okay? That's just a craziness.

Well, I mean, China has a lot of local problems. You know, China, they're very poor, and once again, it's their poverty. You know, everyone has seen pictures of the Chinese air that you can cut with a knife, it's so thick. That is a function of Chinese poverty. Many people think, oh, it's because the Chinese burn coal for electricity. No, if they burn more coal for electricity, the air would be clean. What's causing Chinese. The. The Chinese problem is during the wintertime, homes burn coal to keep warm and to cook. And all that coal is burned inefficiently just goes out through residential chimneys and apartment building chimneys. If you remember, in urban areas in the US in the early 20th century, they just burned coal in furnaces. That's how apartment buildings were heated and the air was bad. So we've gone past that because we're all much wealthier now. We have, you know, better technologies. But in China, they don't have that. So there. It's filthy.

It's interesting. I remember when I was younger, I used to donate money to Greenpeace when I didn't know any better. You know, altruistic young person. Right. I remember reading the Greenpeace magazine, and this was shortly after the fall of the former Soviet Union. And they chronicled in gory detail the massive environmental damage, the birth defects caused by environmental pollution, that it just insane things that would just make your skin crawl. I mean, just disgusting. And the fundamental idea that if you rent a car, you don't take as good care of the rental car as you do your own car. Everybody knows this intrinsically. Right. It's obvious. But, you know, when you own the land, you have more incentive to take care of it. Capitalism is. Is good. It incentivizes people to take care of what they own for their own selfish reasons. Right now, no single person owns the environment. Right. We all have to share that. But certainly if you have a bunch of central planners, you know, when it's everybody's property, it's nobody's property. Nobody cares about the. You know, it's the tragedy of the commons. Right.

Well. Right. The funny thing is, is that we just finished a whole century where central planning was on display and it was.

Everywhere. I mean, you know, the left can't even come up with an example of where it hasn't failed on any subject. You know, the notion that, say, Cuban health care is a model when Michael Moore sick.

Ridiculous. I know. I mean, Michael Moore was sick recently. Right. I remember reading that and I was thinking, why is he not in Cuba where they have better health care than here?

There you go.

And all these celebrities that said they'd move if Trump got elected, why haven't they left yet? Where.

Where is. Why is Ruth Bader Ginsburg still here?

You know, it's just this nonsensical emotional arguments. You know, it's just crazy. But, you know, I do think the left points out some stuff. They have some points. And I think Bernie Sanders is delusional as he is. You know, he brought up some issues, like, he brought some issues to our attention, one of them being the disgusting private prison system, which I don't think. I think government does need to handle some infrastructure type things. You know, I don't think there should be a profit incentive to take away people's freedom, you know?

Yeah, well, okay. I mean, I think all that stuff is, you know, fine to debate.

Yeah.

What sets me off is this abuse of science to service the left political agenda. You know, these more sociological economic issues. Yeah, there's room for debate on that kind of stuff. But, you know, here we have. The left wants us to believe that, you know, by keeping ourselves warm and keeping our ore cool in the summer and keeping our economy going with fossil fuels and being able to drive ourselves everywhere, somehow this is going to end the planet through global warming.

The interesting thing is, like I mentioned earlier, it's always the population problem. That's what they always get to. And you know, the. The environmental heroes should be people like Stalin and Mao because they've ended a lot of lives. They clean up the Environment. But see, the problem with that thinking is that they view humans as a cost, as a. As a detriment, as the scourge of the earth rather than a resource. I mean, look, humans are the people who figure out the brilliant ideas that drive us forward and clean up the environment. I mean, it's humans that do this stuff that, you know, yes, humans make a mess, but they also clean up their mess most of the time. Not always. But all of these discoveries and this technology that cleans the environment, that preserves things, is invented by a person. The people are the resource. I mean, you know.

No, you're absolutely right. I used to talk about that a lot. Humans are resources. And that's how, if you will, capitalists look at people as resources maybe sometimes to exploit them, but they're viewed as resources positive. The left use them as cost centers and destroyers of the environment. And that just. It's wrong, I guess.

You just, you know, it's a difference. Like, some people like people and some people just don't like people, you know, maybe.

Well, they claim to like people. They claim to care about everybody, but in fact, they care about nobody.

Well, when push comes to shove, it doesn't work out that way. Give out your website and tell people where they can find out more.

Yeah, so my website is junk science.com youm can follow me on Twitter at junkscience and my new book is Scare Pollution why and how to fix the EPA. You can get it at Amazon.com or at junk Science where I'll sign a copy for you.

Fantastic. Stephen, thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

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