The hits just keep coming from Louisiana’s governor-elect, signaling major and welcome changes from the policy path of the current chief executive.
Yesterday, Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry announced that he would appoint Aurelia Skipworth Giacommetto as head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. Giacommetto served as the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under Republican Pres. Donald Trump, is trained as a biologist and lawyer and has extensive experience working in the chemical and public policy areas. As with all gubernatorial appointees prior to receiving Senate confirmation, she will retain the job unless the Senate doesn’t vote to confirm her by the end of its 2024 regular session.
The choice will discomfit the political left, because Trump! In its bizarre worldview, anybody or anything having to do with Trump not only is a terrible thing for mankind, it’s entirely illegitimate within the American political system. That’s why it has loathed Landry, who Trump likes, and this selection likely will be the first of many to work it into a lather.
In reality, Louisiana’s DEQ, unlike state agencies dealing with environmental concerns in some other states (witness Democrat Pres. Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency’s Director Michael Regan in his previous post), never has been captured by leftist environmentalism, much less climate alarmism, not even under Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, so there won’t be much policy change. Giacommetto’s appointment won’t work up leftists as much as what Landry said about her appointment.
Landry made clear that in his administration no favoritism would be played by state government policy-making, at least insofar as emanating from his office, in picking winners and losers among energy providers. This markedly differs from the creed of climate alarmists like Edwards, whose faith dictates that any energy source not renewable, particularly fossil fuels, be shunned because those forms that release carbon, methane, or particular other gasses allegedly cause – even if real world data never have demonstrated this – too much climate warming.
Indeed, Landry pledged that not only discrimination against the state’s fossil fuel industry would stop but also he would do what he could to support it, to the point that it doesn’t contribute to actual degradation of the environment. This also runs counter to the alarmist creed that government must bend over backwards at any cost to taxpayers put its thumb on the scales to favor renewable sources, if not punish all others, because climate emergency!
His full-bore defense of a more scientifically-derived understanding of the place of fossil fuels in public policy and Giacommetto’s selection seemed to flummox the news corps attending the announcement, who Landry had to coax into asking questions. After a few seconds hesitation and a prompt, he was asked about whether he would continue the Edwards crusade for carbon neutrality. Landry noted the evidence showed that kind of unrelenting emphasis and its associated costs and economic disruption was economically destructive, especially for the working class.
So that would be a negatory. He answered another question signaling his rejection of any power portfolio mandating use of renewables.
Not that this comes as any surprise. Last week, at the final meeting of Edwards’ Climate Initiatives Task Force – his method of trying to go around the Legislature as best he could that issued a garbage-in-garbage-out report that formed the basis of executive actions he undertook to implement as best he could as limited as it was the climate alarmist creed – it devolved into a weird combination of elegy, obituary, wishful thinking, and updates on plans largely to waste federal dollars already in the pipeline. Expect Landry to ignore, if not retract, any of Edwards’ executive actions that allowed this to exist and any actions taken related to its work products.
This is the agenda that will send leftist elites into a tizzy. It’s also the agenda that will aid Louisianans, outside of ideologues and rent-seekers latched onto the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hoax, to prevent wasting tax dollars and reducing the quality of their lives. And promises much more of the same kind of relief in other policy areas as Landry rolls out more of his agenda.
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