EPA to Fairbanks, Alaska--Freeze in the dark

The New American:

So, you’re living in Fairbanks, Alaska, and it’s 45 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The high today will be -39 degrees below zero. The weather services all project lots more double-digit minus numbers in the coming days and weeks, with dips into the minus 50s and 60s. Heating oil prices are killing your family budget, so you crank up the wood stove and start burning some of the firewood you collected last summer. Uh-oh! Now you’re in trouble!

Yes, you’re merely trying to survive economically — along with trying to keep the wife, kids, and grandma from freezing to death. Of course, that's not a mere theoretical possibility in these temps — but federal EPA bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., have determined that fine particulate matter (soot) in your wood smoke is verboten.
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"Everybody wants clean air," state Rep. Tammie Wilson told the Associated Press. "We just have to make sure that we can also heat our homes." Rep. Wilson sponsored a citizen initiative passed in October that bans the borough regulation of home heating devices. The borough, she said, has no business stepping in with restrictions when no one knows if they will work. "We're still waiting here for a model, a model that shows us that if we do A, B and C, we can then get into attainment," she said. "We have not seen anything from the borough, from the state or from the EPA showing us that that is even possible with the technology that is available to us."

The citizens have spoken; they have told the local, state, and federal officials that they would rather not freeze to death to satisfy federal bureaucrats who are in a fretting frenzy over theoretical deaths from soot. The citizens are on firm ground, as it turns out; the “science” the EPA has based its PM2.5 standards on is shoddy at best. Like the “science” cited by alarmists who are all in a twist over global warming, the studies providing the basis for PM2.5 are based on computer models and hidden data, not actual measurements and peer-reviewed analysis.

Kathleen Hartnett White, distinguished senior fellow-in-residence and director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment, Texas Public Policy Foundation, is one of many experts who have caught the EPA “scientists” fudging big time. She writes:

Whenever the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is confronted with evidence that its proposed regulations will kill jobs, risk blackouts, or otherwise harm economic growth, it typically seeks refuge in its own estimates of the amazing public health benefits the proposal will have. 

By 2020, EPA rules “will prevent 230,000 early deaths,” one recent Administration report claims. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has gone so far as to testify before Congress that the new regulations would provide health benefits as valuable as a cure for cancer.

“Such unequivocal declarations scare the public and can intimidate the skeptic,” says White. “If EPA claims about saving lives were true, the case for its aggressive regulatory agenda would be compelling. How can society worry about higher electric rates or losing American jobs to foreign shores, after all, when thousands of human lives are at stake?”

However, as White shows, “peeling back the layers of assumptions behind EPA’s conclusions reveal that the agency’s claims are misleading at best and deceptive at worst.”

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The EPA has only problems and no solutions.  It should at least have to weigh the early deaths from freezing against the potential deaths from particulate.  It would probably make more sense for Fairbanks residents to wear dusk masks in the winter than to freeze to death.