Jonathan Lange: Truth Makes Best Policy, and Hageman Knows It

To distort reality, you need to quash the truth. Last week we talked about a prosecutor who wanted to silence a Finnish member of parliament and scrub anything she ever wrote or said about physical, psychological, or theological differences between boys and girls.

Climate alarmists have the same impulse. Six years ago, climate scientist Michael Mann tried to scrub my column, “Is man-made global warming Mann-made?”

By threatening to sue me and the newspapers that published my article, he succeeded, in part. The newspapers took it down. But I pushed back.

I asked Mann to tell me, specifically, what words were false. I promised that, if I was in error, I would publicly apologize and issue a retraction. He never answered my email.

Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) are intended to stifle speech, not to encourage debate. Wyoming remains one of only 12 states without protections against SLAPP lawfare, despite efforts of the House Freedom Caucus.

I was not the only one. Mann had a reputation for litigiousness. He waged lawfare in Canada, America and elsewhere. Recently, one of the most famous of his SLAPP lawsuits was reversed on appeal.

Mann had sued commentator Mark Steyn and National Review Online (NRO) over a 2012 blog post. After a mockery of a trial, Steyn was ordered to pony up $1 million in damages.

Last March, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia vacated this ridiculous punishment. It lowered Steyn’s fine to $5,000, sanctioned Mann, and ordered him to reimburse the NRO legal fees to the tune of $530,000. Ouch.

This was only one of several setbacks to the climate narrative in recent months. On the first day of the Trump administration, his Executive Order, “Unleashing American Energy,” took decisive action. The previous administration arbitrarily assigned a $42 Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) to every ton of carbon. Then, it gave itself power to subsidize friends and punish foes. Trump deleted this fiat guidance.

Next, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill that greatly reduced the federal government’s use of your tax dollars to skew the energy markets.

By mid-September, Mann was back in the news. After sharing numerous posts that piled on the assassinated Charlie Kirk, Mann resigned from his post as Vice Provost of Climate Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Simultaneously, President Trump famously told the United Nations that “Global warming is a hoax,” and “the greatest con job ever.” The world held its collective breath. Surely, the science gods would thunder at the kid who called out the emperor’s nakedness. But there was only stunned silence.

Finally, Bill Gates broke the silence. He admitted matter-of-factly that “the doomsday view of climate change… is wrong.” Wait! What?

Through all of this, Wyoming’s sole Representative, Harriet Hageman, has been working to translate common sense into federal policies that benefit Wyomingites. Her May 14 Op-Ed in Cowboy State Daily is a good summary.

Wyoming’s legacy industry is not just energy in general. It is energy produced from coal and oil. Instead of “giving tax breaks and subsidies to large corporations,” she wrote, “we need to focus on deregulation and supporting those things that work.”

Every federal dollar that is siphoned off into “green energy” devalues the market for coal and oil. This robs Wyoming citizens of jobs and Wyoming governments of revenue.

The explosion of windmills and solar farms in 2008 - and again in 2020 - was driven not by natural market forces, but by decrees from the Obama-Biden White Houses.

What the government gives, the government can take away. If you are serious about stabilizing the boom-and-bust cycle, don’t hitch your wagon to an out-of-control federal government.

We are a people of the land. We are grounded in reality - not to unicorns and rainbows that are vanishing before our eyes.

Consumers pay the price for bad energy policies. And they pay it both in taxes and in rate-hikes. Hageman explained, “RMP [Rocky Mountain Power] decided several years ago to begin focusing its efforts and ‘investing’ its financial resources in unreliable and expensive energy - predominantly wind and solar - as it ‘transitions’ to ‘clean’ energy.”

That’s the underlying reason that Rocky Mountain Power was back before the Public Service Commission last week in Laramie. It is asking for yet another rate-hike because the federal largess that fueled its business model is drying up.

Federal subsides do not make green energy cheaper to produce. They only make it cheaper to buy. And when those subsidies go away, power producers will simply recoup their costs from the consumers. That’s Economics 101.

Carbon policies that are grounded in truth will always be good for the planet and for the people. Suppressing that truth harms both.

I am thankful for the emerging truth - and for those who are willing to admit it.

Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.