For Immediate Release
Washington, D.C. January 25, 2012
On Tuesday the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center sent the University of Virginia and Michael Mann copies of 40 emails selected as examples of the 27 categories identified as benefitting from the Court’s review of UVA and Mann’s claims that emails in the taxpayer-funded school’s possession are properly subject to the specific exemptions under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). These categories range from discussions of professional retaliation against other scientists who challenged Mann’s work, to those sent to or from Mann from or copying an email account covered by other FOI laws, such as the federal Freedom of Information Act.
This was part of a process agreed to by ATI, the University and Mann’s attorneys as ATI continues to seek Thomas Jefferson’s university to release a cache of 12,000 emails covered under VFOIA that tell an important part of the history of climate alarmism and the often unsettling ways taxpayer money was spent in promoting it.
“The UVA emails are a key part of a history that taxpayers are trying to piece together to place the early climate alarmism, and taxpayer financing of it, in context,” said Dr. David Schnare, Director of the ATI Environmental Law Center. “The alarmist professors who in some of these emails speak about ‘the cause’ have complained that their emails have been taken out of context. Release of the full UVA email collection, all sent or received by Mann after expressly agreeing he had no ownership of or expectation of privacy about them, will provide that context. Considering the behavior of this former UVA professor as documented in many emails already available to the public, these emails are the only means he has to claim exoneration without being accused of a whitewash.”
The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners’ Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal’s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann’s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is “being run by the baddies,” calling them “shills for industry.” In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money “thugs”.
PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research.
In PE-22, Mann alludes to his “dirty laundry” which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results.
PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee - impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA - to “treat this email as confidential” though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author’s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann’s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA.
These emails, if honestly representative of the entire collection, do not make Virginians proud of having paid Mann’s salary.
“ATI, like Greenpeace and its peers, as well as the media, is committed to using transparency laws to make science and government policy open to the citizens who underwrite it, to the exclusion of properly exempt information such as proprietary material,” said Chris Horner, ATI’s Director of Litigation. “Universities are routinely asked to produce emails under FOIA, and most do so quickly. This has recently been proved true at another Virginia university when the media sought emails of a Mann critic. Why UVA wishes to boast of such outlier status within the academic community makes one ask, ‘what is it they are trying to hide?’”
The Petitioners’ Exemplars are available at ATI’s site.
If you wish an interview with Dr. Schnare or Mr. Horner, please contact ATI at info@atinstitute.org.
Why isn’t Lord Lawson dead yet?
By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: January 25th, 2012
Lord Lawson: not dead, despite the fond wishes of internet trolls
This isn’t me asking, you understand. I’m merely repeating a question someone posted on the internet after Lord Lawson had the temerity to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme speaking out in defence of shale gas in a debate with Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper. (H/T Bishop Hill)
Did anyone on Lawson’s side of the debate post similar messages earnestly hoping that Juniper choked on his organic tofu? Or demanding that Friends Of The Earth have its charity status withdrawn because it’s quite clearly a viciously misanthropic, anti-capitalist political organisation funded by deep-green ecoloons who given half the chance would have us all living in Maoist peasant collectives while they busily bombed our economy back to the dark ages? I doubt it somehow. Climate realists tend to be far too busy being nice and reasonable and balanced - as Lord Lawson always takes pains to do - to adopt the Alinsky-ite smear tactics adopted by their opponents.
I’m sure Lord Lawson can take consolation from the words of his old boss Margaret Thatcher: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”
Never were these words truer than in the case of the climate change debate. The alarmists simply haven’t got a leg to stand on, so the best they can do to shore up the ruins of their collapsing cause is to engage in ad homs, appeals to authority and utterly dishonest campaigns like the current Guardian-encouraged witch-hunt to try to force the Global Warming Policy Foundation to reveal its sources of funding.
Why is the campaign so utterly dishonest? First, it succumbs to what Jamie Whyte calls the Motive Fallacy: the demonstrably false notion that if you have an interest (financial or otherwise) in holding an opinion it must perforce be untrue. Whyte gives one example: “A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nonetheless.”
But even better answer comes from this brilliant analysis by Ben Pile at Spiked Online!, who notes the outrageous hypocrisy of the greenies’ harassing of the GWPF when its funding - relative to the amount spent on green propaganda - is so minuscule.
Even the £500,000 that the GWPF received from donors in its first year of operations fades into insignificance when put in perspective.
For example, it would take the combined resources of 25 GWPFs to produce an equivalent of the UK government’s extraordinarily patronising Act on CO2 campaign. The Committee on Climate Change spends more than eight times that much each year on its own operations. In 2010, the quasi-independent Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust received government grants worth 156 million and 70 million respectively. That’s a total of 452 times as much public money as the GWPF took from donors. The billionaire Jeremy Grantham = who has around $1.5 billion worth of stock in oil companies - is the benefactor of the influential Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, who wrote The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and WWF enjoy gifts of millions of pounds from the UK and EU governments. And the EU funds associations of renewable energy companies to lobby politicians to the tune of millions of euros per year.
It would be an astronomical understatement to say that the environmental activists banging on about the GWPF lack a sense of proportion and have incredible double standards. The GWPF’s resources are far less than even a thousandth of what is available to the government for research and PR - through its departments, the quangos and NGOs that are recruited into its green agenda, and firms and other associations that will profit by it. And yet this tiny operation has seemingly achieved such reach, to punch far above its weight, against the collective force of all the above.
But perhaps the best reason of all why the GWPF should never have to name its donors is this one, as advanced by Bishop Hill on Twitter:
Greenpeace spokesman: { We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.”. Why would GWPF donors want their names public?
Why indeed.
David Middleton on WUWT
Obama clean energy ad airing in Va. See how leftist US charities funded the big lie here. See Inhofe’s op ed in the Hill on holding Obama to his word on energy here.
A new ad from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that touts his energy and ethics record began airing in Virginia this week even as Republican blasted him over a decision to reject a permit for a proposed oil pipeline from Canada.
The 30-second spot (see below) makes a case that Obama’s policies have promoted clean energy jobs and reduced the nation’s dependence on foreign oil while enduring unfounded attacks funded by wealthy energy industry officials.
This campaign ad is nothing but a collection of falsehoods.
Falsehood #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama"… The Koch brothers (and the oil & gas industry in general) have been anything but secretive in their attacks on President Obama.
Falsehood #2: The ad implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million “clean energy industry” jobs.
The 2.7 million figure is purportedly cited from a Brookings report. The report said that there currently are 2.7 million jobs in America that “produce goods and services with an environmental benefit.”
The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a significant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. (Page 4)
The report says that the “clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010.” So… Obama didn’t even “create” half a million “clean energy jobs.” He didn’t even create half a million clean economy jobs. The Brookings report refers to “clean economy” not “clean energy” jobs. The vast majority of the “clean economy” jobs are not in energy… And almost all of those jobs were created before Obama took office.
More than 82% of the “clean economy” jobs listed in the report have nothing to do with energy production…
Waste Management & Treatment ... 386,116 ...14%
Public Mass Transit… 350,547… 13%
Conservation ... 314,983… 12%
Energy Saving Building Materials ... 161,896… 6%
Regulation & Compliance ... 141,890 ...5%
Professional Environmental Services ... 141,046 ... 5%
Organic Food & Farming ... 129,956 ...5%
Recycling & Reuse ... 129,252 ... 5%
Green Consumer Product ... 77,264 ...3%
Green Building Materials ... 76,577… 3%
HVAC ... 73,600 ... 3%
Sustainable Forestry Products … 61,054 ... 2%
Recycled Content Products ... 59,712 ... 2%
Green Architecture ... 56,190 ... 2%
Air & Water Purification ... 24,930 ... 1%
Green Chemical Products ... 22,622 ... 1%
Total ... 2,207,635 ... 82%
Falsehood #3: The ad implies that President Obama somehow played a role in the increase in US domestic oil production over the last few years… That is beyond ridiculous! The plays and prospects from which the production growth was derived were worked up, leased, drilled and plumbed-up for production over the last decade or more. The effects of Obama’s disastrous anti-drilling policies won’t show up in production data for quite some time.
Obama’s anti-drilling policies began in 2009 and were ramped up in 2010. This is either the most amazingly arrogant lie to ever come out of this President’s mouth or an example of his incredible ignorance of the oil & gas industry and energy in general.
The increase in US oil production has come from two main sources:
1) Shale plays like the Bakken (below, enlarged)
The Bakken shale play has mostly been developed on private property. Very little of the shale plays have been developed on Federal lands – And the Obama administration has actively sought to further restrict development on Federal lands. Apart from the EPA, regulation and obstruction of these sorts of plays are mostly in the hands of State gov’ts.
2) Deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries.
The deepwater discoveries that have been brought on line over the last three years were discovered long before Obama took office...Many were discovered while Clinton was still in office. Construction and installation of the production facilities began long before Obama took office. On top of that, much of the increase in production was the result of the ongoing recovery from hurricanes Rita (2005), Katrina (2005) and Ike (2008).
Over the last two years, the Obama administration has almost paralyzed operations in the Gulf of Mexico with an unlawful permitorium and has aggressively tried to hamper the shale plays with fraudulent EPA attacks on fracking and unlawful efforts to make BLM lands unavailable…
So far, during the presidency of Barack Obama, the price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped 83 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The administration has the smallest number of people with real business experience - less than 10% of any president the last century. All the others had 3 to over 6 times as much experience. Obama’s hope and change was to come from the brilliance of academics and textbooks and unproven or false assumptions. Can America afford four more years of no hope and more unwanted change???
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Nothing sound about EPA science
by Sen. James Inhofe and Sen. David Vitter
Three years after President Obama’s inaugural promise to “restore science to its rightful place,” independent government agencies have uncovered numerous instances of scientific abuse at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As the EPA grapples with this criticism as well as a recent embarrassing court decision, President Obama must have felt compelled last week to appear at headquarters to give his EPA a “pep talk.”
The President’s EPA morale boost came just months after an Office of the Inspector General report found that the EPA cut corners and short-circuited the required peer review process for its December 2009 endangerment finding, which is the foundation for EPA’s plan to regulate greenhouse gases. EPA was dealt another blow to its scientific integrity when President Obama forced the agency to withdraw its plan to tighten the ozone standards because the economic and scientific analyses were so blatantly unsound.
More recently, an extraordinary D.C. Circuit Court ruling in December blocked EPA from moving forward with its signature air rule, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, because EPA failed to follow an adequate, open and transparent process.
And just last week, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report confirmed that EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program-which EPA acknowledges is the “scientific foundation for decisions"-is flawed. The report highlights “both long-standing and new challenges” EPA faces in implementing the IRIS program, echoing previous concerns from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that the agency is basing its decisions on shoddy scientific work.
Scientific concerns also extend to EPA’s recent activities regarding hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Last month, the agency released a highly criticized draft report on an investigation attempting to link fracking to ground water contamination near Pavillion, Wyo. This draft report-which has yet to undergo peer review and has substantial data gaps as well as methodological concerns-supplements a broader agency study on the potential impacts of fracking on drinking water resources, which has likewise been criticized for not adhering to established scientific procedures.
It’s unfortunate that the EPA under President Obama has degenerated into an agency that won’t review, assess, share or critically analyze its scientific work. We voiced our concerns with the quality of work coming out of EPA regarding the ozone standard in a nine-page letter last June, in which we asked EPA to address numerous questions related to significant matters of scientific integrity, weight of evidence, data selection, conclusions and impacts based on the best available scientific and economic analysis. We have not yet received a response. In fact, EPA was so reluctant to have any review of their work that it was necessary to block a key nominee in order to get EPA to contract with the NAS for a single review. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson later admitted on the record that the NAS review would not have happened without the hold.
It was White House Science Advisor John Holdren, who promised to ensure “Executive Branch policies are informed by sound science.” In October 2011, along with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, we sent Holdren a nine-page letter asking more than 30 specific questions relating to scientific matters and concerns of scientific integrity at multiple agencies. In December, Holdren refused to answer even a single question.
When EPA fails to act after multiple concerns are raised by the GAO, the NAS, and even the agency’s own inspector general, the only conclusion is that EPA is fraught with a dangerous willingness to disregard scientific evidence when it contradicts the agency’s political goals.
EPA’s science-the foundation of the Obama Administration’s damaging regulatory agenda-is not sound. And because the administration refuses to be transparent, we don’t have any clue whether anyone at the White House or EPA is even trying to fix the problem.