Thomas Fuller:
...a skeptic whose ideas are being suppressed is probably far from the truth.
The Environmental Protection Agency was kind enough to return calls and send emails responses regarding the "suppressed story".
Essentially, the EPA notes that the analyst was allowed to present his opinion both inside and outside the agency, and they were published on at least four occasions.
If this is true, then the Competitive Enterprise Institute has a serious problem.
The EPA also noted that they are trying to find out how to make the analyst's report available.
The analyst in question is Alan Carlin, an economist who has been with the EPA since 1972. Although this has been presented as if his report was skeptical of the received wisdom regarding climate change, a report found on his website (Why a Different Approach Is Required if Global Climate Change Is to Be Controlled Efficiently or Even at All), Some of his opinions differ from the IPCC consensus and most probably differ from the EPA proposal to treat CO2 as a pollutant.
Based on the above, I'm striking out the rest of this article. I'd delete it, but that doesn't seem fair to any of the players - Thomas Fuller.
Another Gristy perspective... by Jonathan Hiskes
...a “suppressed” report at the Environmental Protection Agency continues to grow, despite the fact that the agency appears to have done nothing worse than holding its employees to professional standards. The charge spreading through the news media is that the EPA quashed an internal report because it didn’t fit with the agency’s official position that climate change endangers public health. Al Carlin and John Davidson of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics wrote the report, disputing the scientific consensus that human activities are driving global climate change and calling on the EPA to halt its plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming,” write authors Al Carlin and John Davidson of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics. They go on to criticize the EPA’s reliance on climate science from the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It [the report] was an inconvenient study,” Sam Kazman, CEI general counsel, told me in an interview last Wednesday. “The administration had already decided on a certain course of action, and this would not help.”But the emails reveal little more than a rather tedious employee-management dispute. Carlin’s boss, Al McGartland, tells Carlin that his report won’t be included in the EPA’s official findings and asks him to get back to work on other issues. EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy noted that Carlin’s education and work expertise are largely in economics, not climatology. That’s why his comments on climate science were not included.
“Certain opinions were expressed by an individual [Carlin] who is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue,” she said.
“Nevertheless, several of the opinions and ideas proposed by this individual were submitted to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. Additionally, his manager allowed his general views on the subject of climate change to be heard and considered inside and outside the EPA and presented at conferences and at an agency seminar. The individual was also granted a request to join a committee that organizes an ongoing climate seminar series, open to both agency and outside experts, where he has been able to invite speakers with a full range of views on climate science. The claims that his opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false.”
Read more by Jonathan Hiskes and Grist’s original story
