report returns to snag CO2 regulation
by Ron Arnold
The NCEE was ready to cement the case for the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” the official declaration that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels poses a threat to human health and welfare. Thousands of government careers, academic contracts, and Big Green grants hung in the balance, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson needed to release it within days.
But senior research analyst Alan Carlin, Ph.D., a 38-year EPA veteran never known as an ideologue, submitted his unlikely critique that the agency’s case was full of predetermined, politically mandated, cherry-picked scientific garbage.
Carlin criticized as many details as possible in the four days before the finding’s release: EPA had relied on outdated research and ignored major new developments, including declines in global temperatures, projections that hurricanes won’t get worse, and findings that ocean cycles best explain temperature fluctuations.
“I did the reasonable thing,” said Carlin. “I applied the scientific method to every study used in EPA’s technical support document,” as you’d expect from a man with a physics degree from CalTech and a Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Alarmingly, he found more computerized guesswork and editing by advocates than observable results. Carlin urgently requested that his report be forwarded immediately to top decision makers.
The director refused. In an email to Carlin, he said, “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.”
Imperiling his career, Carlin explained that he knew where his duty lay concerning scientific truth and the administration, and got these appalling replies: “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change,” and, “Do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of NCEE on endangerment. There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls etc.”
The message: Dr. Carlin, hush your mouth. EPA Administrator Jackson and President Obama have made up their minds. Don’t bother them with facts. And don’t you dare tell the American public. Hush!
An outraged source in EPA who was not Carlin passed the whistleblower documents and emails to Sam Kazman, general counsel of Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington free-market think tank.
Kazman was astounded by the “Hush” emails, accepted the case, and began a successful campaign to make the suppression of Carlin’s report a cause celebre. A few days later, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill barely passed the Democrat-held House and the Senate warily let the measure die.
But EPA released its endangerment finding, which immediately faced an appeals court challenge.
As Obama’s much-touted “science-based policy” rotted into “policy-based science,” Big Green sycophants praised the administration in a quarter-page Washington Post ad.
And so we got Hushgate. That was two years ago. Two weeks ago, Carlin’s report, updated, expanded, and peer-reviewed, was published in the respected International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Carlin’s 47-page, no-nonsense report rips computer modeling, false comparisons between hypotheses and real-world data, and efforts to manipulate climate measurements.
Main points: The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions are vastly lower than EPA estimates, and the costs are vastly higher. Conclusion: “the risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it.”
That will sorely test the influence of Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, who recently called for disdainful green groups to recognize their waning clout and “adopt a less arrogant approach that takes into account all sides of the global warming debate.”
Fat chance.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
Robert Ferguson
Science and Public Policy Institute
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