The power-hungry weather cultists at Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are bragging this week that they’ve arrested and prosecuted an American for “smuggling greenhouse gases” across the US-Mexico border. The EPA boasts that it has made its first successful “climate change arrest,” implying it plans to make more. We suppose the good news is that the Biden regime has finally stopped something from crossing the US-Mexico border. We’re just sorry they didn’t stop something serious like fentanyl or illegal alien Al Qaeda terrorists.
San Diego resident Michael Hart, 58, was arrested in March of this year. He pleaded guilty in December to smuggling refrigerants into the United States from Mexico and selling them on Facebook Marketplace and other online stores. If you have an older refrigerator or air conditioner, these chemicals keep them working.
These refrigerant chemicals, which make comfortable life in Western civilization possible, are known as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). The EPA brags that Michael Hart is now the first-ever American to be convicted of bootlegging the chemicals for refrigerators and air conditioners.
The US Attorney for Southern California, Tara McGrath, says that this “will not be the last” case of its kind.
“We are using every means possible to protect our planet from the harm caused by toxic pollutants, including bringing criminal charges,” the climate zealot added.
Just to be clear, Michael Hart did not do anything to harm the planet. He didn’t smuggle the HCFCs into the country just to dump them in a nearby creek. He sold refrigerants to HVAC companies so they could keep people’s refrigerators and air conditioners running. Hart made a profit off the trip to Mexico and the HVAC companies saved some money on supplies that they normally buy elsewhere. No planets were harmed during these transactions.
What Hart didn’t know—and which most Americans probably don’t know—is that Congress passed a bill in 2020 called the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act. The bill banned the importation of HCFCs into the US, in hopes of reducing the use of refrigerants by 85% by the year 2036. By the way, this plan will make your electric bill skyrocket.
Congress enacted the AIM Act to comply with the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This was an international treaty that was adopted based on the fake, unscientific, and unproven theory that refrigerants, aerosol hair sprays, and cow farts were eating a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer. The goal of the Montreal Protocol is to completely phase out the lifesaving chemicals that make it possible to refrigerate our foods and cool our homes when it’s hot.
Anyway, the EPA is now bragging that it nailed the big-time “climate criminal” Michael Hart and shafted him for smuggling air conditioning chemicals into the US. He’s not the only American to run afoul of the Biden regime’s lunatic weather rules, however. The EPA says that it has arrested another 121 people and charged them with climate crimes in 2024.
The EPA also sued 1,850 individuals and companies in civil court cases for breaking rules that they probably weren’t even aware of. The federal government managed to suck $1.7 billion out of the private sector in the form of fines and penalties from those civil cases.
Michael Hart now faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for helping people repair their refrigerators and air conditioners. The EPA is calling him a “dangerous polluter,” even though he didn’t pollute anything and sold the chemicals to licensed HVAC contractors. Aren’t there more serious problems in our country that the federal government could be focusing on?