NYC Letter: Political Science 101

Day 159 of CHOPE

Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.

Mr. Obama,
bragging on his cellophane administration
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS
OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
WASHINGTON January 21, 2009 (White House)

Here is the administration you can see right through in practice.

EPA MAY HAVE SUPPRESSED REPORT
SKEPTICAL OF GLOBAL WARMING

June 26, 2009 (CBS News) - 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.

So Team Barry after soliciting an endangerment finding and not getting it, simply does without the finding.

TRANSPARENCY CONSISTENT WITH A POLICY OF PHONY SCIENCE
The Expected Findings Are The Findings To Be Found

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an 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.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. Mr. Carlin:

It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else. That was obviously coming from higher levels.

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to "have any direct communication" with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

Well, the EPA's protestations notwithstanding, there seems to be little "may have" to the above headline.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) comments:

CEI is submitting a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of EPA’s position on Endangerment was essentially put under wraps and concealed. The study was barred from being circulated within EPA, it was never disclosed to the public, and it was not placed in the docket of this 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.

From the suppressed report's preface (p.4):

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 findings reached by outside groups, particularly the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the CCSP [Climate Change Science Program],** as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclusions and documentation.

… We do not maintain that we or anyone else have all the answers needed… Our conclusions do represent the best science in the sense of most closely corresponding to the available observations that we currently know of, however, and are sufficiently at variance with those of the IPCC, CCSP, and the Draft TSD [Technical Support Document] that we believe they support our increasing concern that EPA has not critically reviewed the findings by these other groups.

As discussed in these comments we believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA before any attempt is made to reach conclusions on the subject. … The Draft TSD suggests to us that we do not yet have that capability or that we have not used what we have.

The report only argues to get the science right before proceeding. It is policy neutral where the EPA was looking for a pro-policy finding.

It is common among religions to suppress heresies. And the hierophants of global warming do not want their acolytes disturbed by actual science or critical inquiry. Global warmists cannot bear challenges to orthodoxy. [Pause.] The science be damned.

[Hat tips: NewsBusters, Gateway Pundit]

This is what transparent scientific debate refereed by a community organizer looks like.

CHOPE.

Nothing to see. Move along.

------------------------------------
* The report has the windy title, Proposed NCEE (National Center for Environmental Economics) Comments On Draft Technical Support Document For Endangerment Analysis For Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under The Clean Air Act.

** More examples of "independent review processes" under Mr. Obama here and here and here.

*** Recently reinvented as the Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

Posted by Damian at June 28, 2009 11:45 PM