Lots of observers were skittish with the election victory in November of Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a staunch social conservative unafraid to rattle cages. The Washington Post editorialized that he might prove an “embarrassment” for Virginia as did The Virginian-Pilot. More conservative editorial writers were delighted with him.
Well, it hasn’t taken long. Straying a long ways from the typical confines of the Old Dominion, Cuccinelli has filed a petition against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which after a decades-worth of study, has declared that six greenhouse gases coming from factories, cars and big electric plants pose a threat to the ecosystem and the public health.
Of course, most of the world has little trouble with this and many governments have made such declarations. There are plenty of supporting scientific studies which would be the basis of some kind of international effort to curb greenhouse gases which have been found to promote global warming.
Even big U.S. corporations such as power-generators Dominion, Duke Energy, and Excelon support some type of “cap and trade” restrictions because they (1) realize the scientific problems and reasons behind warming; (2) they want to avoid future lawsuits by shareholders and environmentalists armed with a preponderance of data about the human factor in global warming and (3) they might be able to do just as well, if not better, profit-wise by turning to newer types of technology that are more eco-friendly and less reliant upon dwindling global supplies of polluting hydrocarbons.
So much for being long-sighted. A core element in the right wing wonk movement (CATO, A.E.I. The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, which publishes a another version of Bacon’s Rebellion that is tightly censored for ideological purity), wants to diss global warming as much as it can. To discredit attempts to regulate greenhouse gases, it wants to pretend that human activity has nothing to do with such gases.
This is where Cuccinelli comes in. Not only has he filed a petition against the EPA, he cites among his reasons for doing so, a mini-scandal at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia which last year suffered a kind of mini-Watergate that involved computer hacking and e-mails supposedly casting doubt about the scientific veracity of global warming. This is because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation’s body supplying supporting data on global warming, makes big use of the East Anglia school, even though there are many other sources as well.
Anti-warming ideologues such as Cuccinelli have leaped on the scandal as some kind of conclusive evidence that global warming is false. Whatever.
Maybe someone should give Cuccinelli a world map and a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The last time I checked, The University of East Anglia is in the County of Norfolk, England, not the City of Norfolk, Va., in the U.S. Unfortunately, Cuccinelli’s legal venue does not extend to the County of Norfolk (although it does the City of Norfolk, Va.). Also, Cuccinelli’s legal authority does not extend to the EPA , which is a federal, not state, agency.
Trying to make his case, Cuccinelli says that he is, by training, an engineer along with a lawyer, and that he knows that any reputable scientific findings must be verifiable by independent testing. True enough, but keep in mind that Cuccinelli is a mechanical, and not an environmental, engineer. In other words, he would have more credibility if he were talking about industrial processes or copying machines than the global environment.
Of course, Cuccinelli’s play is purely political, not to mention ideological . It is part of grand strategy of the right wing arm of the GOP to promote a bunch of mini revolts at the state and local levels to raise awareness of pet projects such as dissing global warming, arming citizens to the eye-teeth and banning abortions. The targets are elections later this year and of course, beating Barack Obama in 2012.
Cuccinelli’s ploy already has won praise from The Washington Times, the faltering Moonie newspaper that says Cuccinelli is “spot on.” But you have to worry that the other Washington newspaper might have it right — that Cuccinelli’s anti-global warming, anti-federal tantrum is an embarrassing sideshow for the citizens of the Old Dominion.
It isn’t as if Virginia doesn’t have other more serious problems, such as jobs. So far the state’s GOP leadership has presented us with a weak mish-mash of jobs bills while screwing around with Cuccinelli’s petition and laws that that make it OK to bring a loaded handgun into a bar.
Rumor is that even Gov. Bob McDonnell is trying to keep Cuccinelli on a shorter leash. But all of this makes Virginia look like some Southern backwater rather than a worthy player on the global scene.
Peter Galuszka