Gag Order Imposed

Your tax dollars at work. The Environmental Protection Agency is protecting itself from everyone, including it’s own Inspector General’s Office. (IG)

In a report released by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility website workers in the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance were forbidden to speak with anyone in an effort to “ensure timely responses and assist in tracking and record keeping obligations”.  The order came in a June 16th email, stating that if an employee is approached by a reporter, the IG’s office or GAO requesting any kind of information, to say nothing other than refer that party to the proper authority.

The EPA public affairs office released it’s explanation of the gag order, saying it was implemented to respond to the IG’s report, and ensure “consistency and coordination among those responding to the IG and GAO reports”.

The EPA has been under a lot of heat recently, in one case the IG’s report, “EPA Can Improve its Oversight of Audit Followup” which was issued in May of 2007.  The report chided the EPA for it’s lack of accountability for correcting admitted deficiencies reported in previous IG audits.  Congress has attempted to subpoena agency files and agency director Stephen L Johnson has reportedly refused to appear before a Senate committee.

Read more of this story »

Google has offered to match donations made to UNICEF and Direct Relief International for all donations made at Google’s Support disaster relief in Myanmar page, up to one million dollars.

Internet users in Burma reported that access to Google and Gmail had been blocked by the strict military junta governing the country in the summer of 2006. By this time, Yahoo and Hotmail had already made the censored IT blacklist.

Read more of this story »

85 year old Liz Moore is nobody’s fool. The minute she laid eyes on Syncrude’s Canadian Oil Sands operation in Alberta, Canada, she knew some terrible things were happening to the ecology of that area. While touring the company’s site, she took pictures of land not reclaimed, a few snapshots in the visitors center, and came home to Colorado bound to tell a story. She set up a website, The Oil (Tar) Sands of Alberta The Canada/U.S. Connection, and published her pictures along with some interesting facts about the operation.

Almost immediately, Syncrude’s legal staff wrote her and demanded she remove the pictures she had taken. Shortly thereafter, the company’s publishing firm did the same, as did the Alberta provincial government concerning pictures of the Oil Sands Discovery Center which they helped fund.

Liz also maintains another website: Energy Smart

Here is her story….

On Friday, the administration embraced a study from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that concluded with "90 percent certainty" that human carbon emissions over the last 250 years have caused the global climate to warm. Before warning of possible "unintended consequences" of mandatory carbon caps, Bush's Energy Secretary Samuel Bodwin went so far as to say:

Human activity is contributing to changes in the Earth's climate. That issue is no longer up for debate.

You might think that acknowledging the human responsibility for climate change while worrying about possible economic consequences of fixing the problem seems a bit disingenuous, but that's just because you've been reading too much Orwell.

While all this was happening, California Rep. Henry Waxman was holding hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on a recently released report (PDF) from the Union of Concerned Scientists accusing the Bush administration of systematically manipulating science to meet their policy goals. More than 1600 government climate scientists were asked about their experiences, and findings in the report include:

Nearly half of all respondents (46 percent of all respondents to the question) perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words "climate change," "global warming," or other similar terms from a variety of communications.

Two in five (43 percent) perceived or personally experienced changes or edits during review that changed the meaning of scientific findings.

More than one-third (37 percent) perceived or personally experienced statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented scientists' findings.

Nearly two in five (38 percent) perceived or personally experienced the disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate.

Nearly half (46 percent) perceived or personally experienced new or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate related work.

The report, and the subsequent Waxman hearings, inspired an exceptional editorial from the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Good climate scientists have no political agenda. They seek to apply their skills within the long-established norms of scientific inquiry to understanding what is happening to global climates and what that portends. Their findings are critical to ensuring that the U.S. government embraces the wisest possible climate policies. Ensuring the integrity of federally funded climate science should thus be a high priority for the U.S. government, which does most U.S. climate research. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has turned that priority on its head. [...]

The reason for the political interference is clear: The Bush administration has an indefensible pro-business bias that trumps even the health and welfare of the nation's citizens. Because efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming could have severe impacts on deep-pocket companies close to the administration, its perverse logic dictates that the global warming science be suppressed.

Scientists often have good news for us ("We cured polio!"), but sometimes they figure things out that we'd rather not hear ("Sorry, but the earth isn't the center of the universe."). Climate science is no different. It turns out that when a few billion people participate for decades in the uninterrupted practice of releasing heat-trapping gasses into the earth's fragile atmosphere, things start to heat up a bit. Denying, censoring, and distorting science in the past has set us back centuries in the quest for knowledge and truth. Denying, censoring, and distorting climate science may not leave us with too many more centuries.