This column on EPA faking science for years is VERY important because the
online story at the Washington
Examinershows A LETTER FROM CONGRESS TO EPA AND THE LAME EPA REPLY! – something
I can’t email to you. Please go to the online story and leave a comment.
Convicted
felon designed EPA's playbook for faking science
Arnold> July 8, 2014 | 5:15 pm
Everything
the public believes about President Obama's Environmental Protection Agencyis wrong - the only thing that powerful agency protects is
its royal kingdom, ruling over the American economy with the highest-cost rules
in the nation's entire bureaucracy.
And
the promised huge benefits of EPA's rule-making were wildly overstated in rule
after rule using a tactic invented by John Beale, a corrupt high EPA official -
now a convicted and imprisoned felon for pretending to be a CIA agent while
doing no work and living lavishly on the EPA executive payroll - with the
complicity, urging and praise of agency elites including EPA boss Gina McCarthy.
America,
we’ve been swindled.
The
day after my July 1 column rebuking the EPA’s empire-building, I received a
number of EPA and congressional documents and letters that indicated I hadn’t
dug deep enough.
They
came from Washington attorney Christopher Horner, iconic watchdog famous for
using the Freedom of Information Actto expose EPA's skullduggery - including former
administrator Lisa Jackson's
false email identity, “Richard Windsor.”
Horner
is now the go-to guy “for EPA employee informal whistleblowerswho provide public records the agency prefers not see the light of day,"
as he told me.
The
key letter, date-stamped March 4, 2013, shows Sen. David Vitter,
R-La., and Rep. Lamar Smith,
R-Texas, warning then-assistant EPA administrator Gina McCarthy that they had
investigated and knew about the horrifying quandary that now faces all of
America: EPA's glittering promise that its clean air rules will generate $2
trillion in benefits through 2020 and its pledge that benefits will exceed
costs by a ratio of 30-to-1 are flat lies.
We’re
not going to get those benefits and we’re paying dearly to be cheated – time
after time. EPA has used its overstatement trick more than 30 times to betray
the public trust with expensive and onerous new regulations.
How
do I know that? One of the Horner documents was "EPA's Playbook Unveiled: A
Story of Fraud, Deceit, and Secret Science."It's a 67-page staff report of the Senate Environment and
Public Works committee's Republican members that traced the exponential growth
of the agency's power over the American economy - EPA using bald-faced lies.
EPA
convict John Beale became the master of deception because his best friend
Robert Brenner, the Clinton administration's head of EPA's Office of Policy,
Analysis, and Review, hired him - during the tenure of Carol Browner, Al Gore's former
Senate staffer, as EPA administrator - with a high salary and no qualifications
beyond unscrupulous scheming.
Beale
proved his dishonesty when a nasty fight developed in 1997 over EPA’s “policy
call” to regulate tiny particulate matter (PM2.5). Beale wrote a memo that
recommended overstating the benefits, backing the benefits claim with any
science that suggested a link between PM2.5 and death, and shielding the
science from scrutiny in case it was questioned.
Combine
that with Brenner's - and Browner's - ability to stiff-arm Congress and ignore
the Office of Management and Budget, White House technology experts and EPA's own science
advisers, and you have the EPA's playbook.
The
PM2.5 science that EPA found consists of only two data sets, the American
Cancer Society (1972) and “Harvard Six Cities” (1974) studies, which were two
decades out of date, much challenged and never released — even the EPA never
saw the raw data — and were never independently verified. This pathetic excuse
for sound science could easily be manipulated to turn promises of vast benefits
from regulating PM2.5 into credible lies — which the EPA did.
That
was bad enough, but, as the Senate report documented, every time EPA dreamed up
any new air regulation, “co-benefits” of PM2.5 control were added to the new
rule’s zero benefits to make it look like big benefits. Co-benefit theory was
one of Beale’s most pernicious and power-drenched inventions.
What’s
wrong with this picture? If the 1997 PM2.5 rule did what it promised, there
should be no more PM2.5 – but EPA kept adding it to every new rule as a
“co-benefit.”
That
sounded so preposterous that I contacted a reliable congressional source to
make sure I got that straight. I laid out a comparison: “EPA begins with a
bucket of dust (particulate matter), and promulgates a rule that’s supposed to
empty the bucket. No more dust. Then another rule comes along with a bigger
bucket of dust that the new rule won’t empty, but adding on the old rule’s
'co-benefit' will. Over time, this happens with 33 buckets of dust that
magically vanish and reappear as bigger buckets of dust.”
The
source verified my comparison and added that bigger benefit claims came with
each new co-benefit bucket, all justified by the same two antique, invisible
Cancer Society and Harvard studies that may be more science fiction than
science.
That’s
appalling. It’s like some warped, nightmarish Disney Irish Fantasia: the
leprechaun pot of gold at rainbow’s end meets the sorcerer’s apprentice.
We’ve
been fed illusions of benefits that don’t exist by EPA’s ruthless regime for
many years now. Beale is idolized as a hero at the agency. To this day EPA
defends the trickery and scientific deception pushed by federal inmate number
33005-016 at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution. That’s true heart rot
in our government.
The
quandary: What do we do about it? Storming the EPA Bastille at Washington's
Federal Triangle with torches and pitchforks is not an option. But it is only
right and proper that honest, hard-working Americans never again trust or
respect the EPA or its minions or its supporters.
RON
ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center
for the Defense of Free Enterprise.