Last weekend, I ran a two-part interview I did with Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). (Part 1 / Part 2) This week, PEER announced that the Obama EPA had ordered two EPA attorneys to take down a youtube video they had posted--"The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009"--criticizing the Obama-supported cap & trade approach to climate change as fatally flawed. PEER has reposted it for them. The two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are married to each other, and each has worked at EPA for over 20 years. In the video, Zabel, speaking for both of them, refers to their experience as EPA attorneys, but immediately states that they are not represeenting the EPA:
ALLAN ZABEL: Our opinions are based on more than twenty years each working as attorneys at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.
According to PEER:
The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31 .... On November 5, 2009, EPA ethics officials ordered the two veteran employees to -
"Remove your climate change video from You Tube by the close of business on Friday, November 6, 2009";
"Edit your You Tube video...by:
(i) Removing the language starting at 1:06 min - 'Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.'
(ii) Removing the images of EPA's building starting at 1:06 min...
(v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min - 'In my work at EPA, I've been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.'"
"All future requests for approval of an outside writing activity must be accompanied by a draft of the document that is the subject of the approval request..."
"EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who has re-posted the original video and its script. "EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay."
Here's the video, so you can judge for yourself (more about the incident, as well as the couple's argument, on the flip):
Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set "the stage for other panels to amend the legislation."
This may be one of the most important things anyone's said yet about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, or ACES. Ken Ward Jr. writing at The Charleston Gazette shares a quote from the communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, Phil Smith:
As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.
I've been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.
It doesn't seem unreasonable, as many have pointed out, that industry's weeping and wailing about this bill in public hides the fact that they know it's the best deal they're going to get.
Indeed, the EPA is one of the few government agencies that's done anything constructive to push us away from the destructive, outmoded coal industry. As the indispensible David Sasson reports, they did so just yesterday:
In a previous post, I wrote about how the coal industry got its way with ACES, the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Much of their victory had to do with sharply limiting the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose chartered purpose is to protect the environment, and therefore, public health.
The agribusiness industry won a similar victory. When Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the House Agriculture Committee and point person for an alliance of rural and coal state Democrats seeking to weaken the bill, put his foot down and said, "I'm pretty sure that any role for EPA in agriculture is a deal breaker."
Rep. Peterson's main complaint about the first draft of ACES, and what seemed to be the general complaint of the House Agriculture Committee, was that the legislation didn't give farmers enough money for things they were already doing. Throw more money at us based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, he said, or no deal.
House leadership took Peterson at his word. Like, for example, this word:
Yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) delivered a big blow to the proposed Big Stone II plant and a huge victory for our climate and environment.
Just as a little backgrounder, Big Stone II is a proposed coal plant in South Dakota that would provide power to Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota. All these states have huge wind power potential but Big Stone II would commit us to dirty energy for generations. Here's a longer factsheet. It's a terrible idea but seemed to be heading towards approval, until today.
(I'm a fan of RFK Jr's passionate advocacy. Until he veers off into the not-quite-reality-based weeds. Jim raises some very important points here. And it's not just about this one case. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Yesterday, I wrote a Quick Hit about an email campaign trying to prevent RFK Jr. from being picked as head of the EPA or Secretary of the Interior due to his stance on vaccinations. DarkSyde has since done a brief rundown of the reaction from the science blogging community.
There were two main criticisms of the campaign to stop RFK Jr. The first was that his stance on vaccines isn't too extreme. These commenters opposed my comparison with creationists and global warming deniers. The second was that even if his stance is anti-science it's not the scientific area he would be responsible for at the EPA or Department of the Interior, so it shouldn't matter. I will address these points below the fold.
Last December, the White House simply refused to open an e-mail from the Environmental Protection Agency because it contained the unwelcome conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and therefore need to be regulated. The EPA finding was a response "to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment," the New York Times reported last Wednesday.
Faced with the proverbial inconvenient truth, the White House not only refused to open the e-mail, they ordered Jason Burnett, the EPA official who sent the document, to "recall it," according to the Washington Post.
Burnett, who has, not coincidentally, since resigned, told the Post:
"In early December, I sent an e-mail with the formal finding that action must be taken to address the risk of climate change...The White House made it clear they did not want to address the ramifications of that finding and have decided to leave the challenge to the next administration. Some [at the White House] thought that EPA had mistakenly concluded that climate change endangers the public. It was no mistake."
I'd accuse the administration of foot-dragging, but that implies some kind of forward movement, however glacial (now, there's a word that's headed for extinction, thanks to climate change.) The dinosaurs who've been dictating our energy policy in this country are as encased in asphalt as the fossils at the La Brea Tarpits, and just as unlikely to budge.
Jon Stewart highlighted this new low point from the Petro-Pusher-In-Chief on the Daily Show last Wednesday with a segment called "Be Patient - This Gets Amazing":
This may be the most badass Congressional statement I've ever seen. It's from Henry Waxman, in reponse to the Bush administration's EPA just blocking California's attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles released about five minutes ago.
EPA's decision ignores the law, science, and commonsense. This is a policy dictated by politics and ideology, not facts. The Committee will be investigating how and why this decision was made.
