Even After Court Loss, Pa. Governor Still Fighting for Carbon-pricing Program

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, announced this week that his administration will appeal a court ruling that blocked his attempt to force power companies in the state to pay for greenhouse gas emissions.

As the Associated Press reports, Shapiro wants to exert executive authority more than to actually implement the green policy; in fact, he did not pledge to enforce the policy even if he wins in the courts, even urging the state Legislature to come up with a different plan.

The legal dispute in question originated with former Gov. Tom Wolf, who enacted a plan to combat global warming by making Pennsylvania the first big fossil fuel-producing state in America to have a carbon-pricing program.

But a Commonwealth court did not take kindly to the policy, voting 4-1 on Nov. 1 that Wolf’s plan is a tax and thus needs legislative approval to be lawful.

The governor’s office released a statement saying that, “Should legislative leaders choose to engage in constructive dialogue, the governor is confident we can agree on a stronger alternative to RGGI [the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative]. If they take their ball and go home, they will be making a choice not to advance commonsense energy policy that protects jobs, the environment and consumers in Pennsylvania.”

It’s highly unlikely that a carbon-tax plan would pass in the Republican-controlled Legislature, as the state GOP is closely aligned with the interests of the coal and natural gas industries.

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman responded to Shapiro’s “misguided” appeal:

Gov. Shapiro’s action further places family sustaining jobs at risk and stymies the ability for any meaningful conversations on energy and environmental policy in the Pennsylvania legislature. The governor should be standing with working families who are struggling with inflationary costs and pressures from higher electric bills.

AP further reported:

In the House, where Democrats hold a one-seat majority, neither a carbon-pricing plan, nor Shapiro’s most well-defined clean-energy goal — a pledge to ensure that Pennsylvania uses 30% of its electricity from renewable power sources by 2030 — have come up for a vote.

Backers of the regulation included environmental advocates as well as solar, wind and nuclear power producers.

They have called it the biggest step ever taken in Pennsylvania to fight climate change and said it would have generated hundreds of millions of dollars a year to promote climate-friendly energy sources and cut electricity bills through energy conservation programs.

Democrats continue to stoke fears about global warming to advance their agenda of greater government control. Last week, the Biden administration released the fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA), which was chock-full of fearmongering about the damage CO₂ emissions are allegedly having on Earth.

“The more the planet warms, the greater the impacts. Without rapid and deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, the risks of accelerating sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather, and other harmful climate impacts will continue to grow,” the report states, playing up the danger the Earth is supposedly in.

Biden showed little tolerance for anyone who dares disagree with his party’s environmental stances.

“But it’s simply a simple fact that there are a number of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle — MAGA Republican leaders — who still deny climate change, still deny that it’s a problem,” he said. “Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future.”

“MAGA Republicans” have become a favorite boogeyman of Biden’s on which he can conveniently place the blame for the nation’s ills. But the issue — and the political fight in Pennsylvania specifically — demonstrates the true end of the Left’s obsession with global warming.

As the court and Pennsylvania Republicans pointed out, Wolf’s mandate is clearly a tax. Yet neither he nor his successor, Shapiro, cares about the rule of law; both are determined to expand the power of the executive branch at the cost of the constitutional authority of the Legislature in the name of stopping climate change.

For socialists and globalists, the “climate change” agenda has always been one of the fundamental steppingstones toward establishing a New World Order of all-powerful world government. Because the religion of environmentalism asserts that every human activity contributes to pollution in some way, the government is therefore justified in regulating all aspects of life — from farming and transportation to housing and food.

Under this argument, of course, education must be tightly controlled by the state to ensure students are properly indoctrinated with climate hysteria. And since the very presence of humanity on the planet is fundamentally the problem, population control becomes an essential plank of the environmental program.

This is why the globalists have invested so much time and so many resources into making the general public believe that humans are contributing to climate change which will bring about the end of the world. Far too many Americans, especially young people, have been sold on this lie through incessant propaganda. This eco-tyranny must be combated not only in the political sphere, but in the realm of ideas.