Krancer Causes Cancer

In today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I read that there are "45 current or former [Pennsylvania] state officials who have links to the energy industry and gas drilling and fracking regulation, including 28 who have left to take industry jobs."

These officials include our current and past three governors, as well as a bunch of other yahoos.  But my favorite has got to be Michael Krancer.

He's Pennsylvania's current secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.  You know, the department that, like, is supposed to protect the environment.

But Krancer's ties to oil and gas interests run deep.  He was general counsel for a natural gas utility, Exelon, as well as a litigator for an industry lobbying group.  Not surprisingly, his principal activities as secretary have been to craft industry-friendly provisions, to fight citizen attempts to slow or halt the pace of shale gas development, and to make regulation of the industry as minimal and cumbersome as possible.

And then there's his position on global warming, as quoted here: "There is no uniformity within the scientific community on how much the warming is occurring.  And there’s no agreement about how much is attributable to the human part of it and how much is attributable to other factors.”

This is, of course, nonsense.  There's almost complete uniformity within the scientific community on both of these issues.  To those who want to deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming, such uniformity means there's some vast scientific conspiracy to quash dissent and amass lucrative research grants.  This, of course, makes no sense either, inasmuch as the real money lies in working for the oil and gas interests that deny global warming.  But global warming skeptics are a very stupid bunch of people, and they'll say just about anything to try to wiggle out of the facts.

I wrote a letter recently to Krancer, asking him to stop being such a stupid idiot and admit that the science says exactly what it says: that human beings are the main drivers of global warming, and that if we don't take immediate steps to curb it, we may well be living in an unlivable world by the end of the century.  Considering the severity of the issue, I was actually pretty polite; I did not, for example, use the words "stupid idiot."  I got a polite reply from his PR stupid idiot thanking me for my letter.

But since it seems to be Krancer's prerogative to say stupid, untrue things, I thought I'd exercise my own right to do the same.  So for the record: Michael Krancer causes cancer.

Though I'll admit there's not complete scientific consensus on that.