It was a damp, rainy Saturday in the land of Global Warming and vapid, rentier capitalism. My little boy and I went to run in his Montessori School’s Annual Spring Zing 5K fundraiser for the school. When I picked up the swag-bag that included my race shirt and number, I found a green-colored water bottle that encouraged us all to save the planet in honor of Earth Day. Then I remembered something: it was the first time all week I had heard jack about the !MANDATORY! and creepily ubiquitous Earth Day.

What has happened to America’s faddishly PC !MANDATORY! celebration? Our occasion for compulsory fun has gone from being like a nationwide company picnic you pretend to enjoy if you can’t squirm away from, to being an embarrassment to those who once lauded its !MANDATORY! civic virtues. Earth Day has collapsed under the irresistible weight of its own brave sierra.*

I personally decided that Earth Day had completed its predictable fridge-nuking operation about two winters ago thanks to George Monbiot. His column “That snow outside is what global warming looks like” did the trick. It was sufficient. Perhaps my fisking thereof was unnecessary. But why did people avoid Earthday this year if not out of the fickle disdain hat eventually overtakes things that go out of fashion as badly as Gangnam Style?

I say again, the whole pagan ritual has collapsed like a Cargo Cult under the weight of its own unreality. The EPA recently continued to demonstrate why so many people think of the American Environmentalist in the same regard as the iniquitous frauds out there hawking Carter’s Little Liver Pills. You see a bunch of dirty, money-grubbing capitalists were attempting to go up to Alaska and engage some malicious job creation via the vile idea known as Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. The EPA describes the potential problems of this hideous suggestion below:

The Bristol Bay watershed in southwestern Alaska supports the largest sockeye salmon fishery in the world, is home to 25 federally recognized tribal governments, and contains large mineral resources. The potential for large-scale mining activities in the watershed has raised concerns about the impact of mining on the sustainability of Bristol Bay’s world-class fisheries, and the future of Alaska Native tribes in the watershed who have maintained a salmon-based culture and subsistence-based lifestyle for at least 4,000 years.

The EPA cites a litany of evils that could potentially occur if we give these Indians living subsistence-level lives well-paying, blue-collar employment. The dangers of economic development include the following threats to subsistence-level poverty: Blocked streams, reduced water flow, removal of c. 14km3 of wetland, diminished salmon habitat quality, and reduced access to spawning grounds for the poor salmon.

All of this sounds awful until we learn who exactly performed the analysis. The EPA typically will farm this sort of analysis out to hired-gun scientific consultants who perform assessments that predictably conform to the pre-arraigned “science” that the EPA pays them for. In this case, the “science” was performed by the now-infamous Stratus Consulting. They are infamous for providing disingenuous research in a $19Billion lawsuit against Chevron Corporation. Details follow below.

The EPA’s new review of the potential Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska, relied on research from Stratus Consulting and Ann Maest, the company’s managing scientist. Stratus recently admitted to providing false statements in a decades-long $19 billion lawsuit against the oil company Chevron.
Maest and Stratus claimed earlier this month that they had been misled by a plaintiffs’ lawyer when they provided an environmental report detailing the damage done by Chevron subsidiary Texaco to areas of Ecuador. They disavowed the report as “tainted.”

Its $19B later that the deliberate fraud comes to light and the excuse brigade circles the wagons. “I now believe that the damages assessment in the Cabrera Report and Cabrera Response is tainted. Therefore, I disavow any and all findings and conclusions in all of my reports and testimony on the Ecuador Project,” said Ann Maest…

So Chevron gets their money back and Maerst rots in an oubliette under some medieval pile of a concentric castle. Am I right? BWANK! Thanks for playin’. The New York Times tells us more.

Craig Smyser, a lawyer for some of the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, said the statements by the consulting firm “should have almost no effect” because the Ecuadorean judge relied on many expert reports other than the one that Stratus was involved in.

So the EPA and the rest of the Political-Environmental Axis use dishonest science to deprive honest, hard-working people of their ability to innovate and make a decent living at the extraction of resources that are in heavy demand. They conflate reasonable fears of negative externalities with faked evidence to prevent economic development and redistribute hard-earned profits for the sake of self-aggrandizement and blatant extortion.

People see enough of this garbage and they no longer truly believe that the snow outside is the result of warmal-cooling and evil rentier capitalism. They come to see that modern environmentalists exemplify rather than prevent The Tragedy of The Commons. Americans see enough of this and come to believe that Earth day is a scam – not a holiday.

*-See Also: Fertilizer, Bovine Fecal Matter, Cow Patties, Umm-gwalla-gwalla, et al.