While the American public is justifiably outraged about a high-ranking EPA official collecting large paychecks while messing around, skipping work and falsely claiming to be doing CIA work, it is the work that John Beale actually performed – rather than the work he didn’t – that should cause the most outrage and alarm. The incompetent, bumbling imposter served as the right-hand man to EPA’s top official and personally oversaw the development of EPA’s climate policy and international climate negotiations. Sound science and the American economy are currently paying the steep price for Beale’s “Spies Like Us” asininity.
In one of the funniest slapstick scenes from the 1985 comedy classic, bungling wannabe spies Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd are caught blatantly cheating on their foreign service exam. Presented with video evidence of their cheating, Aykroyd asks his government overseers, “So what are we going to get, dismissal, suspension, censure, departmental prosecution – what?”
Chase and Aykroyd then bungle their assignment so badly that they launch a nuclear missile against their own country.
Put Chase and Aykroyd at the top of EPA rather than the top of CIA field operations, and you have an idea of how Beale monumentally screwed up EPA climate policy and international climate negotiations.
Inexplicably believing Beale’s story that he was actually a CIA spy and that was why he was missing so much work, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy took Chase and Aykroyd’s slapstick asininity to a new, real-world level. In a memo sent out to EPA staffers, McCarthy attempted to provide cover for Beale to continue skipping work under fictitious CIA pretenses. Beale “is supposed to be sitting in 5426B of Ariel Rios North, but good luck finding him. We are keeping him well hidden so he won’t get scooped away from [his EPA position] anytime soon,” McCarthy wrote.
McCarthy then affirmed Beale would continue overseeing EPA’s climate policy and international climate negotiations.
Putting Beale in charge of crafting our nation’s climate policy was the equivalent of putting Bernie Madoff in charge of crafting our nation’s fiscal policy. Or, in this scene from Spies Like Us, entrusting Chase and Aykroyd to impersonate medical doctors and treat live patients.
While Chase and Aykroyd’s antics make for good comedic cinema, Beale’s antics had much more serious real-world impact. When EPA disregarded mountains of sound science demonstrating carbon dioxide emissions are being scapegoated for a mythical global warming crisis, Chase and Aykroyd – er, I mean Beale – was calling the shots on behalf of EPA’s “scientific” findings to the contrary. As a result, coal miners are being sent to unemployment lines in droves, Americans are being deprived of their most affordable widely available electricity source, jobs and wealth are being shipped overseas and bogus EPA findings are driving the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy.
The Beale fiasco is just the latest in a long line of appalling scandals perpetrated by global warming alarmists. The Climategate and Climategate II scandals should have sunk the fictitious man-made global warming crisis once and for all, but alarmists and their media allies worked to ignore and hide the truth. The Fakegate scandal of 2012 further demonstrated the agenda-driven dishonesty motivating prominent global warming alarmists.
Now we learn that Beale, one of the highest ranking figures in the Environmental Protection Agency, was not only a bumbling fool, but also a criminal, recently sentenced to 32 months in federal prison. His own attorney says his client was motivated “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives.”
You have to search long and hard to find a better representation of the individuals at the top of the global warming movement. Again and again we have seen these are men and women who lie to the public, manufacture false data, conceal evidence and use the power of their offices to attack those who expose their fictitious narratives.
Maybe the best that can be said of these latest revelations is they provide more evidence, in case any more was needed, that the mythical global warming crisis was a canard from start to finish, that the Obama administration and EPA in particular need to be reined in before they destroy even more of America’s economic strength, and that 2014 must be a breakthrough year for the voices of truth.
[Originally published on Forbes]
