Tale of 2 victims of Obama's war on America

First victim: Don Blankenship, former CEO of a giant West Virginia coal mining group.

I first met Don a few years ago on a mountain-top in rural West Virginia. There, a grassy area the size of many football fields was the only sign that there had once been a massive coal mine there. But, after the coal was worked out, Don and his team had given the mountain back to nature.

True, the mountain was a few feet shorter than it had been, but it was remarkable how little sign there was of the heavy industrial activity that goes with giving us the electric power we are lucky to be able to take for granted.

The occasion was a Labor Day rally for the miners of West Virginia. To me, the miners have always been the heroes of labor. I salute their courage in facing some of the nastiest conditions on earth as they dig the darkness underground to bring men light.

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The "Democrat" governor of West Virginia was also holding a miners' rally that Labor Day. He attracted a crowd of 2,500. Don Blankenship's rally to say thank you to his workforce and their families and to reassure them that they were not destroying the planet through "global warming" attracted – get this – 100,000.

Our rally outdid the governor's rally 40 to one because the star speaker at the rally was yours truly. I had the privilege of giving the miners the scientific and economic reasons why Obama's war on coal is unnecessary and is really part of his war on America.

Actually, I'd better be honest. The real reason why the roads throughout the state had been blocked for eight hours before the rally was that before I spoke from one of the two giant sound-stages erected on the mountain top, Hank Williams Jr. had performed a pounding, joyous two-hour set on the other stage.

The miners, though, were delighted to hear the news that their industry was not destroying the planet. They were genuinely interested to hear a little of the science, and gave me a kind and enthusiastic reception – and the chance to speak to a larger live audience than most politicians will ever address.

The climate communists, of course, were as furious as the "Democrats" that our rally had so resoundingly trumped theirs and had attracted the world's media. They decided to strike back.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration began taking an unprecedentedly detailed and pettifogging look at Don Blankenship's mines. In particular, they singled out the Upper Big Branch mine. There, for six months, they sent their inspectors into all parts of the mine, poking and prodding and interfering.

The mine was in a geological formation where methane gas could burst through at any time. Accordingly, the management maintained massive air pumps forcing air through all parts of the mine, so that any irruption of methane would be immediately so diluted as to become harmless.

The MSHA, however, effectively took over control of the mine. They told the management that its ventilation scheme was unacceptable. What they did not do is state what alternative ventilation plan they would have preferred. Instead, in accordance with their calculatedly unconstructive standard operating procedures, they ordered the management simply to produce a series of alternative plans, each of which was rejected until, eventually, they accepted a plan that entailed a drastic and dangerous reduction in the flow of air through the mine.

Not long afterward, while the MSHA were still in effect running the mine, methane burst through from the surrounding rock formations, and there was a catastrophic explosion that killed 29 miners. It was one of America's worst mining disasters.

MSHA now had a serious political problem on its hands. By its device of never actually telling the management what ventilation plan it would have preferred, it hoped it would be able to get away with blaming the management for the disaster. But the miners and their families were muttering. So the MSHA, with the active co-operation of the "Democrat" governor and, eventually, of Mr. Obama himself, began to shift the blame for the 29 deaths away from itself and onto the blameless management – and specifically onto Don Blankenship, on the ground that, although he had not been the manager of the Upper Big Branch mine, he was ultimately responsible as the CEO of the holding company.

It was payback time.

The governor produced a blubbingly mawkish, scientifically illiterate report blaming the disaster on safety failures by management. The MSHA produced a far lengthier document that buried in a couple of terse paragraphs its own responsibility arising from its effective takeover of the safety function at the mine in the six months preceding the disaster, and spent the rest of the report blaming the management for a series of safety infractions just about all of which – even if they were real infractions – could not have had the slightest bearing on the disaster.

Next, the director of the MSHA appeared alongside Mr. Obama at the White House, where Mr. Obama made a characteristically spiteful speech that laid the blame for the disaster on the management. Before long, Don Blankenship was told he was to be prosecuted. He is now awaiting trial, a blameless victim of Mr. Obama's war not only on coal but also on America.

Second victim: Dr. Willie Wei-Hock Soon. Dr. Soon, whom I first had the privilege of coming across almost 10 years ago, is an eminent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is one of the three distinguished co-authors of my paper in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences pointing out that the incorrect application of a rogue equation at the heart of the climate models is the sole reason for the extreme over-predictions of the now-discredited models. Take away that misplaced equation, and the climate "crisis" vanishes.

As you may imagine, that was not a message the climate communists wanted to hear. They launched vicious attacks on all of us, but they reserved the worst of their malevolence for Dr. Soon. A Greenpeace (i.e. communist) front group wrote to the editor of Science Bulletin shortly after our peer-reviewed paper had appeared, saying that he had misled the editor by failing to declare a conflict of interest in that he had received $1.3 million in grants from fossil-fuel interests over the past decade but had not disclosed this to the journal.

Now, Dr. Soon had won the grants not for himself but for his institution, on the strength of his record of ground-breaking publications on the influence of the sun on climate. Hint: It's the sun that keeps the earth warm. CO2 is a bit-part player.

Each grant was notified to and approved by the Harvard-Smithsonian, which approved not only the grant but also the purpose for which that grant would be applied, and then verified that Dr. Soon's team had spent the grant for that specific, approved purpose. As for our paper, none of us either asked for or received any grant for researching or writing it. However, after publication, the Heartland Institute kindly agreed to pay the open-access fee so that the paper would be available to all, and we acknowledged that fact in the draft press release we sent to the journal.

The unexciting truth, however, is always beside the point for the left. Their story was that Dr. Soon was guilty of a conflict of interest. So they approached their climate-communist friends at the Boston Globe, which duly ran a highly libelous piece by an ignorant, beardless intern called "Sylvan Lane" – silly name, silly "journalist." What is more, when I intervened to get our side of the story into the Boston Glib, I was transferred to one Christopher Rowland, who carefully failed to reveal to me that he had previously written a hatchet-piece attacking Dr. Soon for his success in attracting grant funding for his science investigations at the Harvard-Smithsonian. He agreed to include a short statement by me, which he then edited down to make it shorter still. He rendered it ineffective by writing that I had a long history of denying climate science, or some such dopey formulation.

He, Mr. Lane and the editor of the Boston Globe are now to face a fraud investigation by the Boston police, as are the operators of a climate-communist hate-speech blog which organized an online petition vainly demanding Dr. Soon's dismissal for his alleged conflict of interest – a conflict the proprietors of the blog knew he did not have. Boston's finest will probably do nothing – for now. However, the fraudulent activities of the climate communists are being ramped up in the desperate hope of forcing a global-government treaty through at the U.N. climate conference in Paris this December. So the evidence mounting in various police files may yet be acted upon, as the prosecuting authorities connect the dots and begin to appreciate just how sinister and expensive the biggest fraud in history is proving to be.

The blameless Dr. Soon, then, is victim No. 2 of Mr. Obama's war on America, which, as his State of the Union address made clear, will be waged in furious opposition to anyone who, dares to question the climate-communist party line.

The lesson to be learned from these two tales is simple and clear: The hard left is turning ever more vicious, and the center right must now stand and fight as never before.

It is good news that Mr. Flip-Flop Romney, on reading my recent column on his ill-fated bids for the presidency, has now announced his intention not to run again. The Republicans must now choose someone who is capable of fighting – and fighting hard – against the creatures who are persecuting Don Blankenship and Willie Soon, two outstanding heroes of the resistance to the hatred and lies preached by the newly resurgent totalitarians who are bidding fair to destroy all that your Founding Fathers built.

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