EPA Censorship: Cap and Trade?

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Kimberley Strassel did an excellent job this past spring recounting how Dr. Alan Carlin, a 37 year veteran of the EPA, was "muzzled" for a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. At that time, his superior, Al McGartland, complained that Carlin's paper did "not help the legal policy case" for "Team Obama's" decision to regulate carbon. Carlin was told to move on to other issues and forbidden to discuss his conclusions outside the office. Do we have questions about this behavior? It doesn't seem to be very open, supportive or reinforcing. Some people might even call it very "Republican" - but, we stay out of politics here.

Now, we have Laurie Williams and Alan Zabel who are married and have 20 years each working at the EPA. They too are dismayed at the Democrat's approach to climate, though for different reasons. Dedicated environmentalists, they created a 10 minute YouTube video arguing Congress's convoluted "cap-and-trade" bill was a "big lie" that is too weak. They instead propose imposing taxes on fossil fuels. Ironically, they got permission from the EPA before they did it. But, then they did an op-ed in the Washington Post which got the agency nervous. The EPA reversed itself and said the couple had to take the video off unless they substantially altered it.

As Kimberly Strassel so aptly puts it, "Meet the Obama EPA, and its new suppressing, paranoid style. It was the President who once ripped the Bush administration for silencing scientific critics, and it was EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson who began her tenure promising the agency would operate like a "fishbowl." But that was before the EPA realized how vastly unpopular is its plan to usurp Congress and regulate the economy on its own, based on its bizarre finding that CO2 is a danger to health." Evidently, Mrs. Jackson's goal now is to rush the agency regulations thru as quickly as possible, squashing threatening dissent and deflecting troublesome questions.

Back to Alan Carlin. It's hard to keep track of which side of the climate issue is being suppressed since Carlin's point was that climate science hasn't proved anything. Now, Williams-Zabel come along and claim that cap-and-trade is a big lie and too weak. Both sides are being suppressed. Trauma!

Dr. Carlin says he has been treated "relatively well" since his problems this past spring, yet he has been forbidden from working on climate or attending climate seminars.

It would seem to me that between the suppression of Dr. Carlin's position and the Williams-Zabel problems, there are issues which underline the gap between the agency's transparency rhetoric and reality. Worse, the effort by the EPA to hold down debate on both sides of the climate issue suggests that global warming itself is, at best, an imprecise concept unsupported by very precise science. I don't think Al Gore's conviction can carry that issue no matter how many Nobel Prizes he has.