EPA plays hide and seek; suppressed report revealed
My syndicated column below slams the EPA for suppressing inconvenient truths about Obama’s politicized global warming agenda. As I blogged early Wednesday afternoon, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released e-mails detailing how eco-bureaucrats stifled a senior researcher who challenged the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas “public endangerment” finding.
Breaking late tonight, CEI has released the draft version of the censored study that the EPA doesn’t want you to see. You can read the entire 98-page document here.
Here is the preface, which begins, “We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups…as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclusions and documentation.” No wonder they tried to shut up senior researcher Alan Carlin (click on image for full-size):
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EPA’s game of global warming hide-and-seek
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion-dollar, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.
The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.
On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:
“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision… I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”
Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth-in-science took a backseat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.”
In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”
But, of course, the e-mails show that EPA had already predetermined what it was going to do – “move forward on endangerment.” Which underscores the fact that the open public comment period was all for show. In her message to the public about the radical greenhouse gas rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson requested “comment on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and the major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings.” Ms. Jackson, meet Mr. Carlin.
The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) “is an individual who is not a scientist.” Neither is Al Gore. Nor is environmental czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi. Carlin’s analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, “significant new research” related to the proposed endangerment finding. According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA’s reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data, and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won’t be different than in the past.
But the message from his superiors was clear: La-la-la, we can’t hear you.
In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Another day, another broken promise. Will Carlin meet the same fate as inspectors general who have been fired or “retired” by the Obama administration for blowing the whistle and defying political orthodoxy? Or will he, too, be yet another casualty of the Hope and Change steamroller? The bodies are piling up.
Malkin is author of the forthcoming “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2009).
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Categories: Enviro-nitwits
The GOP died a long time ago.
The awful corruptive thing about the EPA here is that it can “recruit” all the supportive academic/ corporate scientists it needs for this bogus issue by merely dangling a “green” (and I don’t mean environment) carrot in front of them.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Reminiscent of the suppressed reports that Iraq had no WMD.
Wanna test a liberal’s knowledge of the environment?
I’ve found asking them this question reveals a lot:
“Aside from water vapor, CO2 and other greenhouse gases, what’s the atmosphere’s most abundant element?
9 times out of 10 they will blurt out “oxygen”, when the answer is nitrogen (by almost 4-to-1). Together they make up roughly 99% of the atmosphere.
Then ask them what percentage of the atmophere is CO2?
They almost all have no clue. (Answer: 0.038%)
Yet they will claim “the science” is settled that runaway CO2 is destroying the planet, when they themselves don’t understand the basics.
Try it!!
Make sure you howl with laughter when you catch your lib expert in his abysmal ignorance.
By what criteria or standards does ECONOMIST Al McGartland present enough educational or real-world expertise to even qualify for his EPA position, let alone to sit in judgment of the hard, earnest research of Mr. Carlin!
fulldroolcup said (#104):
What matters is that they know who knows — scientists, not Rush Limbaugh.
DBNinKY said (#105):
He’s an economist in the economics branch, like his subordinate Carlin. They are not climate scientists. Neither on is in the climate science division.
Algore isn’t a scientist in any shape or form, yet he gets to make $100 million in 9 years preaching fake “science” and stupid, gullible, Obama-voting sheeple buy right into it.
Hopefully, we can put a stop to nonsense like this when we get REAL legislators into office in 2010. Hopefully the USA will still be standing by then. Obama is slowly wrecking this country.
His so-called pork plan signed in February has resulted in 1.6 million jobs LOST.
And this idiotic so-called crap and tax bill will send another 1 million to the jobless list.
Thank you morons, thank you idiots with a 2nd grade reading level who voted this incompetent poser teleprompter in chief as our “president”.
Correct, and the Democrats in charge are playing along; they know if they build up Gore into some green-icon, younger voters may look to him for enviro-policy concerns and keep voting Democrat.
For example, why is economist Al McGartland – with no formal or expertise in the natural sciences – keeping back Mr. Carlin’s objectively researched report?
No man is a source citation unto himself.
Mr. Carlin’s report (assumptively) references the compiled works and analysis of published scientists in support of his arguments/thesis. Yet McGartland, with no discernible knowledge in earth science or even physical science, stymies the report and for no apparent reason, other than it disputes the meme of Gore and his “green” followers.
Facts??? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts!! Sadly, this is apparently the “true” philosophy of the Obama camp and his propaganda machine (MSM) and many of the gullible sheeple of this country who voted for “the one”. Short-sighted are those sheeple for they know not what they do. They are looking for immediate gratification (handouts, mortgage forgiveness, food stamps, welfare checks, etc.) when they vote for the likes of Obama. Down the pike, when there are no more freebies, it will be too late to change back to a productive society, and the Obamas will seek to blame the conservatives for the demise of our society. So obamabots, sheeple of our nation, enjoy it while you can…the rest of us are not planning to continue supporting parasites and corrupt politicians forever.