November 15, 2009

Alleged scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty at Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency
by Bill Levinson

Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has already put it on record in her letter to the Wall Street Journal that the real purpose of so-called greenhouse gas regulations, such as government-mandated cap and trade regulations, is to enrich Barack Obama’s campaign contribution bundlers at J.P. Morgan Chase (six figures in bundled contributions) and Goldman Sachs (almost a million dollars in bundled contributions).

Bundled contributions are entirely legal but the thing nonetheless speaks for itself; Barack Obama is dancing the cap-and-trade with the fat cat climate profiteers who brought (or bought) him at the expense of the American people. This could easily be why his Environmental Protection Agency is allegedly engaging in academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct to support the cap and trade agenda. We refer specifically to the alleged suppression of research that does not support Barack Obama’s “climate change” agenda, and therefore does not support the bottom lines of Goldmine Sachs (Michael Savage’s terminology), J.P. Morgan Chase, and their fellow climate profiteers at General Electric (almost $500,000 in bundled contributions to elect Obama).

(Downloading, copying, and circulation of this cartoon is encouraged. It is designed to appeal to the working class voters who make up the Democratic Party’s base, i.e. the ones who can’t afford $2300 each to attend lavish Team Obama fundraising functions.)

The business of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase consists primarily, as Henry Ford put it in My Life and Work, “speculation in things already produced” as opposed to mined, grown, or manufactured goods that are of actual value to society. These companies, and/or others like them, recently speculated in mortgage-backed securities that were at least backed by real, if overvalued, property. Now they need a new commodity in which to trade, and this is to be government-mandated carbon credits that have as much real use to society as medieval indulgences for sins.

The United States can easily survive without these companies, just as Lehman Brothers and Enron (which also planned to speculate in carbon credits) were no great losses and why former U.S. Climate Action Partnership member AIG should have been allowed to go under. General Electric does deal in manufactured goods but, despite its vaunted Six Sigma program, most of its consumer goods are now produced offshore while its engineers apparently cannot get the cost of its “green” products low enough, or their performance high enough, to make them sell themselves. This is why GE is among the firms (U.S. Climate Action Partnership) that are lobbying for government mandates to force consumers and businesses to buy their products or use their services.

In any event, Obama’s EPA is, if Kimberly Strassel’s allegations are true, engaging in what looks a lot like academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct to help pass the “climate change” laws that Obama’s contribution bundlers need to line their pockets at the expense of working Americans who actually produce goods and services that society finds useful.

Dr. Alan Carlin, a 37-year agency veteran, was muzzled earlier this spring. Dr. Carlin offered a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. His superior … complained the paper did “not help the legal or policy case” for Team Obama’s decision to regulate carbon, told him to “move on to other issues,” and forbade him from discussing it outside the office.

Academic dishonesty includes “data falsification, in which false claims are made about research performed, including selective submitting of results to exclude inconvenient data to generating bogus data.” It sounds like the EPA ordered Dr. Carlin to do exactly that, and was even stupid enough to say that the reason was that the data in question went against Barack Obama’s agenda of regulating carbon emissions–which Kirsten Gillibrand says in turn will enrich two companies that bundled six figures (each) in campaign contributions to elect Mr. Obama, along with the New York Stock Exchange and the non-producers at the new Green Exchange.

Scientific misconduct includes

Suppression/non-publication of data

A related issue concerns the deliberate suppression, failure to publish, or selective release of the findings of scientific studies. Such cases may not be strictly definable as scientific misconduct as the deliberate falsification of results is not present. However, in such cases the intent may nevertheless be to deliberately deceive. Studies may be suppressed or remain unpublished because the findings are perceived to undermine the commercial, political or other interests of the sponsoring agent or because they fail to support the ideological goals of the researcher [in this case, the researcher's superiors up to and including the President of the United States]. Examples include the failure to publish studies if they demonstrate the harm of a new drug, or truthfully publishing the benefits of a treatment while omitting harmful side-effects.

From where we sit, it seems that the allegation “Dr. Carlin offered a report poking holes in the science underlying the theory of manmade global warming. His superior … complained the paper did “not help the legal or policy case” for Team Obama’s decision to regulate carbon, told him to “move on to other issues,” and forbade him from discussing it outside the office” fits the above definitions of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct. Furthermore, scientific misconduct is in fact cause for temporary or even permanent debarment from receiving Federal funds (if performed, for example, by a professor at a university), and this underscores just how serious this allegation is. The people of the United States have a right to know whether the Environmental Protection Agency exists to protect them from genuine pollutants, or whether it has become a front for the advancement of an agenda to enrich campaign contribution bundlers for Team Obama.