EPA has been under fire over revelations that the agency buried an internal study poking holes in its proposed finding that greenhouse emissions are a danger to health. Emails unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute show that agency staffer Alan Carlin was told his report should be shelved because it did "not help the legal or policy case for this decision." He was also instructed by his EPA boss not to discuss his views.
None of this was sitting well with Wyoming Republican John Barrasso when EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson appeared at a Senate hearing yesterday to promote Democratic climate change legislation. Sen. Barrasso not only grilled Mrs. Jackson on the Carlin affair, but complained that the Obama administration was making a habit of cracking down on those who disagree on global warming. He cited a Small Business Administration attorney who authored a memo highlighting the economic downsides of the EPA plan to regulate emissions. Unnamed Obama administration officials smeared the attorney in the media as a "Bush appointee" -- despite the fact that she had been hired during the Clinton Administration.
Mrs. Jackson's main defense was to claim she had no hand in suppressing the Carlin report, adding: "I immediately instructed my staff that he should feel free to circulate it to whomever he wished." Republicans say the suppression undermines the integrity of the EPA's entire rulemaking process on "endangerment," and are calling for an investigation. The Carlin affair, meanwhile, comes in the wake of a U.S Chamber of Commerce demand that the EPA hold a hearing before an administrative judge to allow for a review of the science on which its "endangerment" proposal is based. The administration may yet have to provide some of its vaunted "transparency" on the science of global warming, whether it wants to or not.
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