EPA Suppresses Internal Report Questioning Regulation of CO2
A series of articles and posts are sweeping the Internet regarding malfeasance by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Background: in April the EPA announced they will be regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant [here]. They issued a document in that regard entitled Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (EF). The EPA requested public comment on the “endangerment” finding [here]. The comment period ended June 23rd.
But it turns out that the EPA suppressed their own scientists who had disagreements with the “endangerment” finding, and further, the EPA has no intention or capability to evaluate the public comments they received.
On June 24 the Competitive Enterprise Institute posted the following [here]:
EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study
CEI Calls for Agency to Release Concealed Report
by Richard Morrison, June 24, 2009
Washington, D.C., June 24, 2009 — The Competitive Enterprise Institute today charged that a senior official of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency actively suppressed a scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.
As part of a just-ended public comment period, CEI submitted a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position was put under wraps and concealed.
The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current “endangerment” proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.
“This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”
CEI’s filing requests that EPA make the suppressed study public, place it into the endangerment docket, and extend the comment period to allow public response to the new information. CEI is also requesting that EPA publicly declare that it will engage in no reprisals against the study’s author, a senior analyst who has worked at EPA for over 35 years.
Also on June 24 Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That posted [here]
The EPA apparently doesn’t care about any negative comment of their GHG Endangerment findings, even internally, so the exercise in Democracy we did yesterday [submission of comments to the EPA] apparently was for naught. …
Several internal EPA emails sent by an anonymous whistleblower to the CEI indicate that “a significant internal critique of EPA’s position on Endangerment was essentially put under wraps and concealed.”
As a result of their posting, Watts Up With That was also contacted by an anonymous whistleblower, who (as the result of some diplomacy by Watts and his team) was interviewed by journalist Thomas Fuller. Today Fuller wrote:
The EPA’s internal nightmare over global warming: Part 1
by Thomas Fuller, SF Environmental Policy Examiner, Examiner.com, June 25, 2009 [here]
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.
The EPA’s draft Endangerment Finding was initially written over a year ago during the Bush administration, and Lisa Jackson (the new head of the EPA) and her team wanted to get the Finding out on or near Earth Day, according to a schedule that was made public about a week before formal publication of the proposal. The draft was submitted to agency workgroups with only one week for review and comment, which is unprecedented, and received only light comments — except for Carlin’s.
Alan Carlin, who had hosted a series of seminars featuring peer-reviewed scientists who disagree with the IPCC reports (but were unattended by members of the workgroup developing the Endangerment Finding) went public via the Competitive Enterprise Institute after realising that there would be no debate about the science. The lectures by the scientists are available on the EPA website, but were not even mentioned in the Finding. Carlin was advised to get an attorney — and has since been reassigned to mundane work, some of which is normally performed by outside contractors. …
Meanwhile, the many comments received by the EPA will now be evaluated. Our source indicates that it is most likely that the initial compilation and review will be conducted by outside contractors, who may also provide draft responses, which is really supposed to be done only by EPA staff. Our source notes that the EPA may not have the expertise to evaluate many of the comments …
Also posted today at Watts Up With That is a report confirming all of the above [here].
Also today (although dated tomorrow), the Competitive Enterprise Institute released the censored study [here]
CEI Releases Global Warming Study Censored by EPA
Public Shouldn’t Be Kept in the Dark by an Agency Supposedly Committed to Transparency
by Richard Morrison, June 25, 2009
Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009 — The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.
The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.
New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases. All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.
The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.
“While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.
The upshot is that the EPA under Obama appointee Lisa Jackson censored science and discarded public comments for political reasons. The EPA is not transparent and has lost any semblance of integrity they might have once had (when that was we cannot say).
The political machinations are part of a conspiracy by the Obama Administration to unleash punitive regulations based on the hoax and fraud of global warming. Those regulations, and the Cap-and Trade bill now wending through Congress, are intended to cripple the US economy and inflict heavy new taxes on every American.
Treason in the name of a monumental hoax is still treason. This nation is being led by those who would destroy and dismantle it. The situation is unprecedented and dire.
A follow-up article has been posted by Tom Fuller:
The politics, if not the science, is settled at the EPA. Alan Carlin, global warming and trouble
by Tom Fuller, examiner.com, June 26, [here]
Alan Carlin is the economist and 38 year veteran at the Environmental Protection Agency whose report was stonewalled internally and so was not considered (or so he was told) in their decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. I spoke with him for an hour this evening.
At the end of the hour, the last question I asked him was what had motivated him to come forward with an almost 100-page report written in 4 days detailing the problems with the scientific claims for global warming as given by the IPCC (an early draft can be found [here]). The report was not transmitted internally, and the emails released by CEI on Tuesday suggest to me that this may have been because the report did not support the previously determined conclusions desired by the new Administration.
In Carlin’s personal view “The bottom line is whether or not the IPCC is wrong or right about the significance of increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in increasing global temperatures-it is amazing how few people have asked that question. What’s happening in Australia (where a Senator Fielding is holding a ‘mini-debate’ with skeptical scientists and administration advocates of an Australian cap and trade policy) is fantastic-why can’t we do that here? Models, good or bad, don’t prove or disprove a scientific hypothesis about the real world. I’m dreadfully concerned that we may be taking an ineffective and extremely costly action, and after six years of working on climate change I might be able to help-but I’m not allowed to.”
Carlin got his first degree in physics, before he turned to economics and remembers lunching occasionally with the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman while at Caltech, who told him that if you attempt to compare observations with a hypothesis and the observations don’t fit, you can either change the hypothesis or ascertain if the observations are wrong. Carlin is convinced that observations of climate do not match the hypothesis that human-generated greenhouse gases are producing significant global warming in the real world. He adds ruefully that if the NIPCC report recently released by the Heartland Institute had been available in March, when he wrote his report, it might have saved him a lot of time assuming that it covers many of the same points.
Carlin’s main concern seems to be that the Endangerment Finding (an official declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a danger to public health and welfare) may actually turn out to be a time bomb that may explode in the EPA, echoing the reasoning of our anonymous source as reported earlier today. As I wrote then, the EPA does not want to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air act without legislation limiting their regulation to the largest emitters. If the proposed new cap and trade legislation (which removes EPA’s ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming gases) is not forthcoming, Carlin worries that it may well be very difficult for the EPA to carry out its mandate. His report was an attempt to have the EPA reconsider the science (which Carlin considers bad science), as despite the respectable trappings that cloak the IPCC and their reports, their hypotheses fail many observational tests in his view.
Carlin has been transferred off all climate-related work, but is not at all bitter. He says that from a civil service point of view, his boss ‘absolutely has the right’ to give him new work assignments. “I still have a phone, I can still talk to people in my office,” he says.
Carlin hastens to add that he did not turn over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the emails that were published. “But when a reporter called Tuesday and asked me to verify them it became evident that CEI had them.”
Carlin also assisted in the organization of a series of seminars with notable scientists in the field of climate science, including some notable skeptics as well as ardent “warmists.” They were attended by an average of maybe 30 or 40 employees-but those employees only rarely included members of the workgroup that eventually would be charged with writing the proposed endangerment document.
Later we will discuss the science that Carlin wanted to present to the EPA. For now, he’s another whistleblower who actually wanted to help the organisation that shut him out and moved him off the case.
Is this really how we want to run things?
Once again I want to thank Anthony Watts, Charles the Moderator and the rest of the crew at the weblog Watt’s Up With That for their generous help in getting this story in front of you.
by Steven S.
Once again power hungry politicians are playing with the lives of citizens for their own agenda. Thank you Mr. Carlin for your courage. Gore and his minions believe that we (the citizens of the United States of America) are truly stupid. Guess what? NOT 
The suppressed EPA report (Proposed NCEE Comments… ) is very well-written considering the haste the author(s) was (were) operating under. However, I was disappointed in the brevity of the section that dealt with “endangerment.”
That section (pages 64 through 66) lists increasing crop yields over the last 30 years, declining heat-related mortality, improving air quality, and increasing life expectancy as indicators of the lack of adverse impacts of alleged human-induced “climate changes.”
That list is far too short and understated. The BENEFITS of global warming over the last 30 years also include: longer growing seasons, more rain, increased agricultural productivity, increased biological productivity of all kinds, increased biodiversity, expanding populations of so-called endangered species (such as polar bears), reduced poverty, famine, and disease, and a host of other positives associated with a warmer planet.
The EPA action to regulate CO2 is based on two assumptions, first that CO2 causes global warming and second that warming has negative impacts to Humanity and the Environment. The latter is the so-called “endangerment.” Neither assumption is proved; in fact both are demonstrably false. Climate realist sites such as WUWT have concentrated on the former, but the latter is equally important to refuting and contravening the EPA’s proposed regulatory action and the Waxman-Markey Cap-and Trade, the largest tax hike and economy monkeywrench in American history.