Paul Driessen and CFACT promote climate "hoax" conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts loves a good conspiracy theory, particularly the one about climate science being a hoax. He would probably claim that he doesn't "believe in" conspiracy theories, yet he constantly posts them on his blog.

Today it was Paul Driessen, who's employed by CFACT to lobby against environmental protection, in one of his more blatant articles (archived here). Usually he is moaning about clean air and water, wishing the USA would resurrect the smog and dirty water of decades past. Paul wrote stuff like this today:

The notion that manmade carbon dioxide now drives climate and weather – and we can predict climate and weather by looking only at plant-fertilizing CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” – is just as absurd now as before.

The quotes are a giveaway, even if you knew nothing about the subject. Putting the words "greenhouse gases" in quotes shows that Paul is a greenhouse effect denier. He doesn't believe in physics and chemistry.

What WUWT and the anti-world movement doesn't know - Earth Day 2016

This Earth Day, leaders from 175 nations signed the Paris Climate Agreement, which was a record for a one-day signing, according to the UN.

On this day each year there's also a tradition, if you can call it that yet, that anti-environment blogs like WUWT publish a list of unsourced quote-mines purportedly from the first Earth Day. Anti-environmentalists say that predictions didn't come to pass. The unspoken message is that therefore they will never come to pass and all their anti-environment fans can therefore feel free to continue to destroy the planet. It's an unspoken plea to "bring back smog".

Paul Driessen and CFACT want to send Americans back to the Smog Age

After an article about the Bronze Age, now Anthony Watts is touting the delights and health benefits of the smog age (archived here). Many Americans probably don't remember that golden era (dirty pink-yellow haze era?) all that well. When I was in primary school, we learnt about the smog in Los Angeles, where the topography collided with the vehicle exhausts and factory emissions and made the air downright dangerous to human health and well-being.

Anyway, Paul Driessen wants the USA to get rid of clean air regs and allow factories and cars to smother his fellow citizens in smog and pollutants. He wrote about:

...concerns about the effects the tsunami of regulations is having on the livelihoods, living standards, health and welfare of millions of American families.

Bring back SMOG - Yay!

Yep. Get rid of that tsunami of regulations. Bring back smog. 

Smog - Credit: Reuters, I think. It's all over the Internet.

What's getting him all irate now is that the EPA is looking to tighten controls to reduce ground-level ozone in the USA. He's rolled this gripe into an article about environmental regulations all up. It's Paul's job to complain about clean air. He works for CFACT, which AFAIK is an anti-environment lobby group for polluters in the USA.

So if you want unhealthy air, go over to WUWT and pledge your support for Paul Driessen and his dirty air pro-smog campaign.

Paul is complaining that the EPA is wanting to reduce the permissible ozone levels to "70 or 60 ppb", Well, this is old news. There's a paper from 2010 with the proposed changes:

The EPA is proposing to strengthen the 8-hour “primary” ozone standard, designed to protect public health, to a level within the range of 0.060-0.070 parts per million (ppm). 

In Australia, the national air quality standards restrict ozone to 0.10 ppm of ozone measured over a one hour period and 0.08 ppm of ozone measured over a four hour period, which isn't too different from what's being proposed by the US EPA. I haven't heard of anyone complaining about them. We like our clean air in Australia.

For more on ozone, here's a handy guide for you if you've got an ozone detector.

From the WUWT comments

There aren't a lot, only four so far and none worth reporting.