Obama administration may have supressed EPA report about global warming.
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.
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.”
Iain Murray at The Corner:
What is particularly interesting is the way the EPA has tried to brush this under the carpet. Rather than take my word for it, as an interested party, best to follow the work of the San Francisco Examiner’s Thomas Fuller. He reported the story, then, faced with a dismissive response from EPA, decided that there was no story there. However, as you’ll see from the link, further investigation proved that there was indeed a real story, and two further updates confirm this. Despite the administrator’s and president’s declarations, political considerations are clearly dominating scientific discussion at EPA. Now, this is in many ways to be expected as part of the political process, but not when the EPA head and her boss have told the public otherwise.
What is also interesting is that so far, it seems that the traditional media read our evidence and the EPA’s denial and stopped there, without further digging. Thomas Fuller, however, did go further, turned over the stone, and found the worms wriggling there.
Marc Sheppard at American Thinker
Thomas Fuller at The Examiner:
A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2.
The source, who chooses not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that Carlin was rebuffed in his attempt to introduce scientific evidence that does not accord with the EPA’s view of global warming, which largely relies on IPCC reports. The source also saw Carlin’s report and said that it was ‘based on 8 points of peer-reviewed, recent and relevant scientific publications’ that cast doubt on the wisdom of regulating CO2 as a pollutant.
On the other side, Jonathan Hiskes in Grist:
And what do the emails reveal? That there’s nothing to this story. An EPA economist wanted to give scientific opinion, which wasn’t accepted—most likely because it’s outside his area of expertise and training.
The dissenter, Alan Carlin, works as a research analyst in Washington at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), which conducts a variety of economic analysis, including cost-benefit studies, risk assessment, and economic impact modeling. In short, it does number crunching, not scientific research.
Carlin’s personal website, Carlin Economics, reports that he received a B.S. in physics and a Ph.D. in economics and joined the EPA in 1971. It also includes links to his publications, the most recent of which support solar radiation management—a form of geoengineering—and oppose reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
If Carlin wanted to comment on the scientific causes of climate change, there’s little in his work experience or education to suggest it’s within his expertise. In an email, his supervisor at the EPA told him to stick to his own work [PDF].
UPDATE: John Hinderaker at Powerline
UPDATE #2: Zachary Roth at TPM
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July 1, 2009 at 9:54 pm
[...] A Tale Of The E-mails [...]