CHICAGO — As with most presidential campaign promises, Barack Obama’s pledge of government openness isn’t lasting long.
A top gauleiter at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appears to be indulging in the same type of cover-ups that Democrats on the 2008 campaign trail so ardently accused the Bush Administration of conducting.
Al McGartland, director of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, has chastised the authors of an EPA study that knocked gaping holes of logic in the agency’s decision to label life-sustaining carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
McGartland’s “cease-and-desist” warnings to the two scientists came to light in four e-mails, obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a Washington-based think-tank that vigorously defends free market principles.
The authors were told by McGartland not to publish the report or “have any communication with anyone outside” the NCEE about the EPA’s decision to classify carbon dioxide as an “endangerment” to our health and the environment. Because the study so adamantly opposed the administration’s decision to name CO2 a pollutant in order to control energy usage, Al McGartland issued the following series of blunt “thou shall nots.”
One e-mail noted: “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls etc” about endangerment.
Another declared: “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed. The administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
Yet another cautioned: “I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in this process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”
And finally came the unambiguous order: “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc.”
The report. which has circulated widely on the Internet, graphically illustrates why EPA kow-towers to Obama’s sweeping wanted it buried — perhaps in a lead-lined container deposited in Yucca Mountain.
Authors Alan Carlin and John Davidson — both holders of Ph.D’s — found that the EPA “paid too little attention to the science of global warming.” Instead, they observed, the EPA accepted findings from other groups such as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) without a “critical examination of their conclusions and documentation.” They devastatingly noted that the EPA’s conclusion that CO2 was harmful was based on old science which is no longer accurate.
Specifically, the study by Carlin and Davidson noted:
- “ Global temperatures have declined extending the current downtrend to 11 years. At the same time atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated.”
- “The consensus on past, present and future Atlantic hurricane behavior has changed.. . Now the consensus is much more neutral, arguing that future Atlantic tropical cyclones will be little different than those of the past.”
- “The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for the operation of such processes.”
- “A new 2009 study suggests that the UN’s IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their research suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in the earth’s global temperatures.”
- The authors also warned the EPA not to make a hasty decision in calling CO2 an endangerment to health saying, “Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030) there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
Needless to say the usually intrepid investigative reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and the mainstream TV networks somehow managed to miss a truly scandalous story with ramifications for the American people that go far beyond the recent steamy revelations of sexual misconduct by politicians.
Readers can access both McGartland’s revealing e-mails and the
authors’ illuminating study here:
Gretchen Randall is a senior partner with the political consulting company Winningreen LLC, based in Chicago. A graduate of the University of Iowa with an MBA from Loyola University in Chicago, she worked in marketing and sales for 3M for 21 years. More recently she was contributing editor of Environment and Climate News, a publication of the Heartland Institute Readers may visit Winningreen’s web site at winningreen and e-mail Randall at grandall@winningreen.com
