So much for unprecedented transparency: "EPA Employees Silenced for Criticizing Cap and Trade"
What would the reaction be if the Bush administration had tried to silence critics this way? This is not the first time that the Obama administration has tried to silence experts in government who disagreed with their global warming decisions. From Fox News:
Laurie Williams and husband Alan Zabel worked as lawyers for the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, in its San Francisco office for more than 20 years, and they know more about climate change than most politicians. But when the couple released a video on the Internet expressing their concerns over the Obama administration’s plans to use cap-and-trade legislation to fight climate change, they were told to keep it to themselves.
Williams and Zabel oppose cap and trade -- a controversial government allowance program in which companies are issued emissions limits, or caps, which they can then trade -- as a means to fight climate change.
On their own time, Williams and Zabel made a video expressing these opinions.
VIDEO: EPA Employees Speak Out Against Cap and Trade
"Cap-and-trade with offsets provides a false sense of progress and puts money in the pockets of investors," Zabel said in the video. "We think that these restrictions might not be constitutional," he said.
Their bosses in San Francisco approved the effort by Williams and Zabel to release the tape, but after an editorial they wrote appeared in the Washington Post, EPA Director Lisa Jackson ordered the pair to remove the video or face disciplinary action. . . .
Labels: Environment, GlobalWarming, governmentintimidation, transparency
posted by John Lott at 10:14 PM
2 Comments:
Back during the Bush administration days, James Hansen, the head if the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, and global-warming alarmist, claimed that NASA was trying to silence him. The NASA spokesman stated that NASA encourages the free exchange of ideas between their scientists and others, but that making policy statements was a different matter, and Dr. Hansen had to follow the same rules as everyone else.
Presumably, the same rules regarding policy statements apply to these EPA lawyers as well.
Or for...
I did noy expect this to go so far. The actual issue is that the video used shots that made it look like the EPA actually helped with it, such as shots of EPA headquarters, stationery, etc. The EPA asked for most such to be removed. Overstepped by asking for future to be approved, but not strenuously.
Much as I dislike the EPA, and indeed think it has outright lied upon occasion, this is being blown out of reason.
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