Two southeastern Colorado farmers have demonstrated what shenanigans might unfold when money and climate mix — as they often do.
According to a Feb. 29 news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Colorado, Patrick Esch and Ed Dean Jagers of Springfield, Colorado, pleaded guilty to criminal charges of tampering with rain gauges, some of which belonged to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In other words, due to the tampering on the NOAA devices, those federally owned gauges showed inaccurate rainfall totals. That, of course, would make actual climate conditions in the area impossible to measure.
It wasn’t clear if the fraudulent data was used for “climate change” record-keeping, but the case definitely raises the question.
Esch and Jagers, however, appear to have had no interest in larger climate-related questions. In fact, they allegedly acted from personal interests alone, motivated by age-old temptations to dishonesty and greed.
Along with unnamed conspirators, Esch and Jagers tampered with rain gauges in order to commit insurance fraud.
According to CBS Newqs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture subsidizes private crop insurance through the Rainfall Index Annual Forage Insurance Plan.
CBS quoted a prosecution document that described the plan as “focused on the amount of precipitation, not on actual crop production.”
In short, the document states “a farmer can receive a payment when precipitation is below the historical normal level even if the relevant farmland suffers no loss in productivity.”
What could go wrong?
Well, according to the news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Esch and Jagers spearheaded a lengthy and elaborate scheme to make precipitation totals in southeast Colorado appear lower than they actually were.
From July 2016 to June 2017, the men “used various means and methods to tamper with the rain gauges,” according to the news release. These included “cutting wires,” “filling gauges with silicone” or simply covering up the devices.
In fact, CBS reported that the operation extended to southwest Kansas.
Esch and Jagers received prison sentences of two and six months, respectively. They were also sentenced to pay a combined $6.6 million.
“Hardworking farmers and ranchers depend on USDA crop insurance programs, and we will not allow these programs to be abused,” U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan said in the news release.
Agricultural sabotage for pecuniary gain has deep roots in American history.
In the early 1680s, for instance, disgruntled Virginians destroyed each others’ tobacco crops in what, according to the colony’s lieutenant governor, they regarded as “the only expedient to advance the price of tobacco.”
Closer to modern times, during the Great Depression, when Americans starved amid a 25 percent unemployment rate, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, part of his much-ballyhooed-but-ultimately-catastrophic “New Deal,” oversaw the deliberate slaughter of livestock and destruction of crops, both designed to raise prices depressed by excess supply.
In other words, FDR’s Ivy League-educated economic advisors had not advanced beyond the 250-year-old tactics of the colonial tobacco plant-cutters.
How much more should we expect, therefore, from the architects of today’s version of the “New Deal”? Probably not much.
For one thing, the so-called “Green New Deal” depends on its advocates’ claims that they can alter global temperatures. As this story showed, however, a few crooks, motivated by greed, made it impossible to even measure a crucial aspect of climate in a given area, let alone control it.
Furthermore, given what we know of human nature, should we expect the instances of greed and dishonesty to diminish when the amounts of money and power at stake grow exponentially larger?
On one hand, of course, we should not read too much into a simple story of insurance fraud.
On the other hand, when it comes to climate-related hubris, no cautionary tale is too small.
After all, insane climate alarmists have already insisted that dangerous greenhouse gas emissions come from cow farts.
In other words, climate alarmists have mimicked their “New Deal” ancestors by targeting livestock for slaughter. Thus, the true saboteurs have not fallen far from the historical tree.
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