As usual the mainstream media read only the summary page and so assumed NOAA cleared of all wrongdoing. But when you dig deeper....

Senator Inhofe Press Release

Washington, D.C.--Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, released the following findings from the investigation by the Commerce Department’s Inspector General on emails from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) related to the “climategate” scandal.

“I want to thank the Inspector General for conducting a thorough, objective, and balanced investigation,” Inhofe said.  “NOAA is one of the nation’s leading scientific organizations.  Unfortunately, in reading past the executive summary, this report shows that some NOAA employees potentially violated federal contract law and engaged in data manipulation.  It also appears that one senior NOAA employee possibly thwarted the release of important federal scientific information for the public to assess and analyze.  Her justification for blocking the release was contradicted by two career attorneys in the Office of General Counsel.  This is no doubt a serious matter that deserves further investigation. 

“Also, the IG recommended that certain NOAA-related emails ‘warrant further investigation,’ so I will be following up to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent according to federal law, and that the public will get access to the science NOAA produces.”

Highlights from the IG Report

Emails ‘Warrant Further Investigation’

“We found eight emails which, in our judgment, warranted further examination to clarify any possible issues involving the scientific integrity of particular NOAA scientists or NOAA’s data. As a result, we conducted interviews with the relevant NOAA scientists regarding these eight emails, and have summarized their responses and explanations in the enclosure.”

Potential Breach of NOAA Contracting

“In addition to the foregoing, we also found two other emails that raised questions, one regarding a 2002 contract NOAA awarded to the CRU...”

“This email, dated June 24, 2003, captioned ‘NOAA Funding,’ was sent by a visiting fellow at CRU, a NOAA contractor, to another researcher (affiliated with a research institution in Vietnam) stating the following:

‘NOAA want[s] to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN [Indochina Global Change Network). How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip [name omitted] didn’t make and also thec fees/equipment/computer money we haven’t spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.’

“Auditing NOAA’s contracting with CRU was not within the scope of our inquiry, but in light of these circumstances it is important for NOAA to be assured that CRU fully complied with the applicable U.S. contracting rules and requirements.  Moreover, NOAA could not tell us the universe of climate-related contracts it has issued over the past ten years to parties and institutions such as CRU.” [Emphasis added]

NOAA Administrator’s Congressional Testimony

Dr. Lubchenco’s testimony before the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming: “The [CRU] emails really do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus and the independent scientific analyses of thousands of scientists around the world that tell us that the earth is warming and that the warming is largely a result of human activities.”

“Dr. Lubchenco told us she could not be sure whether she had read any of the CRU emails or received a briefing from her staff on the results of NOAA’s CRU email review prior to testifying before the House Select Committee.” [Emphasis added]

Thwarting FOIA

“The Co-Chair of the IPCC AR4 WG1, who was the only NOAA scientist informed of any of the aforementioned FOIA requests, told us that she did not conduct a ‘comprehensive search’ for and forward potentially responsive documents for agency processing. This was based, in part, on her understanding that her IPCC-related work product was the property of the IPCC, due to the confidentiality provisions contained in many of the documents.  In addition, she reportedly received verbal guidance from her supervisor and a NOAA OGC attorney that the IPCC-related documents she had created and/or obtained while on “detail” assignment to the IPCC did not constitute NOAA records.” [Emphasis added]

“We interviewed the two NOAA OGC attorneys whom the Co-Chair and her supervisor referenced during their interviews with us to determine what, if any, advice the attorneys provided to these individuals. Both attorneys specifically told us that they had not advised the Co-Chair or her supervisor on this matter at the time NOAA received the FOIA requests referenced herein. One attorney said that he never spoke to the Co-Chair about that issue, while the second attorney told us that he was consulted only after NOAA had already responded to the FOIA requesters that it had no responsive documents.” [Emphasis added]

“Based on our interviews of the two NOAA OGC attorneys, we followed-up with the Co-Chair and her supervisor, both of whom again told us that their handling of the aforementioned FOIA requests was based on advice they had received from these two specific attorneys. We requested from the Co-Chair and her supervisor documentation of any discussions with the NOAA OGC attorneys on this matter, which they were unable to provide. As such, we were unable to reconcile the divergent accounts.” [Emphasis added]

Questions about ‘Objectivity’

“Both the Chief Scientist and the creator of the image told us it was meant to bring some levity to the constant criticism that they and their fellow climate scientists were facing at the time from ‘climate skeptics.’ Notwithstanding their rationale, such an image could foster an adverse appearance about the scientists’ objectivity, and at least one internet blog questioned the propriety of the image. While none of the senior NOAA officials we interviewed said they were aware of the referenced email and the attached picture before we interviewed them, Dr. Lubchenco told us that ‘it was in bad taste.’ According to NOAA, both scientists, who acknowledged that the image was inappropriate, have since been counseled by their respective supervisors.” [Emphasis added]

For much more detail on the Chief Scientist, the attorneys and the FOIA requests see Climate Audit post (Solomon’s Divergence Problem’. See more today about how NOAA Misrepresented IG report.

By Phil Kerpen, AFP

The New Hampshire House of Representatives today voted overwhelmingly - 246 to 104 - for New Hampshire to become the first state to repeal an up-and-running global warming cap-and-trade energy tax system. The state senate is expected to follow suit with a similarly veto-proof repeal. The move has major implications both in the region and nationally.

Since 2008, New Hampshire has been one of the 10 members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a power plant-only cap-and-trade system that holds quarterly auctions requiring electric utilities to buy carbon dioxide permits. The cost of those permits is buried in the rate base and passed on to customers in the form of higher electricity prices. The tab is $28.2 million so far and rising - the state budget estimate for the next year jumped to $70 million in hidden energy taxes under the RGGI cap-and-trade program. Moreover, the program has become a honey pot for corrupt special interest giveaways to corporations, as a recent report from Grant Bosse of the Josiah Bartlett Center showed.

RGGI was supposed to segue directly into a national cap-and-trade system, and was designed by Lisa Jackson, now EPA administrator, when she ran New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection. The pitch to industry was that they could get a head start on buying cap-and-trade permits for two or three dollars each, and make a fortune when a federal bill passed with permit prices ten times that or higher. Now that a federal bill is dead, RGGI is a lose-lose for everyone except the politicians who get to spend the money and the special interests receiving subsidies.

The overwhelming veto-proof, bipartisan vote today means that New Hampshire is now on a path to doing something that looked impossible just a couple years ago - repeal a cap-and-trade program. In the process, it could deal the death blow to cap and trade both regionally and nationally.

While RGGI can survive the loss of a small state like New Hampshire, it could probably not survive the loss of a large state like New Jersey, where a repeal effort is picking up steam fast, with at least 37 co-sponsors. The bill, sponsored by Alison Littell McHose in the state assembly and Mike Doherty in the state senate, added its first Democratic co-sponsor last week in State Senator Paul Sarlo. Activists in the state are making state cap-and-trade repeal the top issue in a campaign year where the entire state legislature is in cycle, and the New Hampshire repeal could raise the New Jersey bill’s profile enough for Governor Chris Christie to finally come off the fence and support repeal.

The national implications are also huge, considering the brick wall of opposition Barack Obama ran into on his cap-and-trade plan in 2009. It now looks like the only path to a national cap-and-trade bill would be for Republicans to again (as they did in 2008) nominate a pro-cap-and-trade presidential candidate. But the presidential nomination runs through New Hampshire, and with debates set to start soon, there will be tremendous pressure on one-time cap-and-trade supporters like Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty to distance themselves from that advocacy and take a strong anti-cap-and-trade stance in a state that overwhelmingly rejected the policy on the state level.

With the New Hampshire fight well underway, green groups will go all out to pressure and intimidate state senators not to support repeal and kill their cap-and-trade dream. New Hampshire state senators should hold firm and follow the strong message sent by today’s bipartisan 246 to 104 House vote. If they do, they can deal the death blow to cap-and-trade - not just in New Hampshire, but perhaps nationally.

Phil Kerpen is vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity.

See the Union Leader story on the vote here.

by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation

Hanging in the Balance: Our Constitutional Order-and the Poor

Move over, executive branch. Congress is feeling its oats.

For several years the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been forcing creative “interpretations” on the Clean Air Act (CAA) - as in creation out of nothing. The CAA doesn’t mention climate change as a potential danger or give EPA authority to combat it. It doesn’t mention carbon dioxide or give EPA authority to regulate it. Nonetheless, EPA has been asserting authority to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the grounds that they promote dangerous global warming.

It began quietly on December 18, 2008, with a seemingly innocuous interpretative memo about the CAA from Bush administration EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. A year later, on December 15, 2009, Obama’s new EPA came out swinging with a “finding” that carbon dioxide (essential to all life and nontoxic at 100 times ambient levels) is a “dangerous pollutant.” After that, EPA promulgated ten other regulations, rules, and interpretations, including six on a single day, December 30, 2010. In a “tailoring rule,” EPA effectively amended the CAA by asserting that though the Act requires regulation of a “dangerous pollutant” source if it might emit over 250 tons per year (100 tons in certain instances), EPA will, in the case of CO2, regulate only those that might emit a hundred times as much.

EPA’s usurpation of legislative power in the tailoring rule was so blatant that it generated loud bipartisan protest from members of Congress early last year, though under solid Democratic control Congress as a whole failed to act. With Republican control of the House, reduced majority for Democrats in the Senate, clear public opposition to cap and trade and other climate legislation, and the 2012 elections looming for Democrats who saw former colleagues who supported cap and trade defeated, Congressional resistance to EPA’s violation of Constitutional separation of powers is growing.

First to strike was Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who with ten co-sponsors on January 31 introduced S. 228, the Defending America’s Affordable Energy and Jobs Act, to strip the entire executive branch of all authority to regulate greenhouse gases with respect to climate change. On February 2 Senator James Inhofe (R-OK, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY, chairman of the energy subcommittee), released a discussion draft of a similar bill . And Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is preparing a bill that, while less sweeping (it would delay EPA regulations for two years pending further Congressional consideration), bears the same message: Get off our turf.

Barrasso’s ambitious bill would permit regulating greenhouse gas emissions only for their potential toxic effects from direct contact with humans but would prohibit regulating them “based on climate effects.” And it would prohibit federal enforcement of any state laws regulating greenhouse gases for climate purposes and deny states authority to tax or penalize any entity for greenhouse gas emissions in another state or to limit import of “products or electricity...based on greenhouse gas emissions” in another state.

Barrasso’s bill is so sweeping that some pundits think it has about as much chance of becoming law during President Obama’s term as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - rocked by Climategate and other scandals over the past year - has of being voted the most trusted, transparent, and unbiased scientific body in the world. But the three bills’ introduction - and others like them - make it increasingly likely that EPA will get its wings clipped, partly because there’s more than turf protection at stake.

It’s the economy, stupid. As Barrasso’s bill puts it, “any action to control emissions of greenhouse gases...would result in substantial impacts to major sectors of the economy.” I.e., EPA’s war on carbon dioxide will have casualties - lost economic productivity, lost jobs, rising prices for energy and everything else, and consequently declining living standards and rising death rates, especially for the poor.

More specifically, economic analysis by the Beacon Hill Institute indicates that implementation of a “Renewable Portfolio Standard” like that proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union message (shifting 80% of our energy use to renewables by 2035 - virtually the same goals embodied in 2009’s Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill) would lower economic production enough to cause an additional 12,000 premature deaths per year. And such a standard is essentially what would be required in order to implement EPA’s war on carbon dioxide.

How any of these bills will fare is anybody’s guess right now. But one thing’s clear: Our Constitutional order, our economic prosperity, the welfare of the poor, and even human lives hang in the balance in this turf war between Congress and the President.

See also this Pajamas media story “Put the REINS on EPA” that suggests we defund EPA, something we strongly support.