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SCIENCE, Space & Technol Comm Hse

this is the main, see sub comm eg sci

see sci suppression, lamar

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CURRY RED TEAM BS CWG

ZOE LTR SEP 18 2025

:{:{Dr. Judith Curry Professor Emeritus Georgia Institute of Technology School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences 311 Ferst Drive Atlanta, GA 30332}:

:{:{Dear Dr. Curry, I write to you to express my deep concern about the matters you brought to light in an interview for a September 11th, 2025, article in E&E News regarding the recently dissolved Department of Energy (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG). 1}:

For months now,2 Democrats on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology have sounded the alarm about the procedural irregularities in the Administration’s attempt to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Endangerment Finding.3 Given your public disclosures, I request that you participate in a formal interview to elaborate on your observations and experiences participating in the CWG during and after the preparation of the report entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.”4}:}:

In your interview with E&E News, you stated that DOE “really didn’t dot all the I’s and cross the T’s,” and that the Department “dropped the ball on really making us an official group affiliated with the DOE, rather than, you know, just sort of an ad hoc group.” The article paraphrased your 1 Scott Waldman, “Disbanded DOE climate group vows to continue work,” E&E News, September 11, 2025, accessed here:

:{:{https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2025/09/11/disbanded-doe-climate-group-vows-tocontinue-work-00556267.}:

2 “Ranking Member Lofgren calls Trump Administration out for risking public health with Endangerment Finding reconsideration,” House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Democrats, March 13, 2025, accessed here: https://democrats-science.house.gov/news/press-releases/ranking-member-lofgren-calls-trump-administration-outfor-risking-public-health-with-endangerment-finding-reconsideration.

3 Letter from Ranking Members Zoe Lofgren and Gabe Amo to Environmental Protection Administrator Lee Zeldin, August 18, 2025, accessed here: https://democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2025-08- 18%20SST%20RM%20Lofgren%20Amo%20-%20Letter%20to%20Administrator%20Zeldin%20- %20Endangerment%20Finding%20Repeal.pdf.

4 “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” Department of Energy, July 23, 2025, accessed here: https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025- 07/DOE_Critical_Review_of_Impacts_of_GHG_Emissions_on_the_US_Climate_July_2025.pdf.}:

P2

lamar comm went after claude walker and team blue AG exxon knew

ref 3 aLSO 404

https://science.house.gov/news/letters/gop-member-letter-state-attorneys-general-coordinated-efforts-deprive-scientists-first

https://web.archive.org/web/20161223154928/https://science.house.gov/news/letters/gop-member-letter-state-attorneys-general-coordinated-efforts-deprive-scientists-first

doz states

https://web.archive.org/web/20161222210749/https://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/05.18.16%20SST%20Letter%20to%20USVI%20AG.pdf

no cut txt, thus DL pdf, nor in adobe but cites wfb, wsj and WT on conspir.

an ah 1 23vs 90 secs doomsday clock

despite all the controversy that has surrounded him, GOP Rep. George Santos of New York has maintained that he has no plans to resign from Congress and intends to serve out all of his two-year term. And Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California is in no hurry to see him go, as he has given Santos a position on the House Science Committee.

Santos’ critics have been arguing that with the Queens/Long Island congressman having lied about so many things, the last thing McCarthy should do is reward him with committee assignments. In addition to lying about his employment and education history, Santos falsely claimed that his grandparents were Holocaust survivors and that his mother was inside the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Records obtained by NBC News show that Santos’ mother was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 11, 2001.

But journalist Andy Levy, co-hosting a late January episode of the Daily Beast’s podcast “The New Abnormal,” argued that as appalling as McCarthy’s decision to put Santos on the Science Committee is, it makes sense from a GOP standpoint. Republicans, ... “don’t believe in” science — and McCarthy thought he was putting Santos on a lesser committee.

READ MORE: **George Santos is living the GOP's values**

Levy told Moodie that "this is Kevin McCarthy showing exactly what he thinks of science and what he thinks of this Science Committee. It's like: Well yeah, throw George Santos on there. We don’t really need that Committee anyway. There are definitely no scientific problems threatening the entire planet. It all checks out if you look at it from that perspective. It makes perfect sense.”

Moodie, meanwhile, described her reaction upon learning that Santos will be on the Science Committee.

The co-host told Levy, “I laughed so very hard. And then, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this man is going to be on the Science Committee.’ Like, do we not realize how critical science is to where we are currently? We’ve had a global health pandemic, we have a climate change crisis, we have all of these things that are happening in the world that, you know, come back to this really important field.”

READ MORE:**Kevin McCarthy standing by George Santos as scandals worsen**

May 18, 2016

13 Representatives sitting on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Committee send letters to 17 state Attorneys General and 8 non-governmental organizations, including Greenpeace. The letters accuse the agencies and organizations of tampering with companies’, organizations’ and individuals’ rights to free speech. Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard responds that “America’s least-respected politicians have now courageously stepped up to defend one of America’s most-hated corporations from scrutiny.” Data from Oil Change International shows that the 13 Representatives who sent the letter have received $2,848,418 in campaign contributions from coal, oil and gas companies since 1999.

may 26: U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), and David Vitter (R-La.) today sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) end its use of law enforcement resources against political opponents of President Obama’s energy agenda.

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an bad 1 23

Freshman New York Republican Congressman **George Santos** has been handed two committee assignments, including one on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which oversees NASA.

MSNBC’s Ryan Nobles reports Santos, who is seen by many as a serial liar and is under investigation on multiple fronts, also landed a seat on the House Small Business Committee. Nobles reports **Speaker Kevin McCarthy** defended allowing the New York Republican two seats, citing “protocol.”

According to its government website, the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has broad jurisdiction across many areas. Some could pose potential national security risks.

The committee has jurisdiction over all research and development in critical areas including energy, astronautical and outer space, civil aviation, the environment, marine research, commercial application of energy technology, and standardization of weights and measures and the metric system.

READ MORE: McCarthy Runs Defense for Santos

In addition to NASA it also oversees the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, and the National Weather Service.

Last week Santos suggested he would like to sit on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, promising that he was a “workhorse.”

2/19

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/1302**2019**/congress-house-science-committee-climate-change-republicans-green-new-deal-niskanen

 House Committee on Science, Space and Technology devoted its first hearing of the 116th Congress to exploring the wide-ranging effects of climate change and explaining the science fueling them, a discussion that revealed a subtle shift among key Republicans toward accepting the prevailing research that points to human-driven global warming.

In her opening comments, committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) said that the hearing is one of multiple sessions on climate change the new Congress plans to hold in order to develop policies to address it. The committee's move to highlight mainstream climate science is a marked break from the last six years when it was led by Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, an ardent climate denier from Texas who retired.

The committee's new top Republican, Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, staked out a more pragmatic and less provocative position than Smith and many other conservatives in Congress had.

"Droughts and heat waves come and go naturally, but the changing climate has intensified their impacts," Lucas said in his opening remarks. "We know the climate is changing and that global industrial activity has played a role in this phenomenon. But our communities, like the farmers and ranchers in my district, need to know more about the extent to which a changing climate affects short- and long-term weather patterns."

under Lucas, the committee's minority side invited as its expert Joseph Majkut, who holds a doctorate in atmospheric science and is director of climate policy at the bipartisan Niskanen Center. Majkut adheres to broadly accepted climate science, unlike some GOP-invited speakers in the past. During the question-and-answer period, Majkut quashed fringe theories that a few members floated about climate change as handily as the scientists invited by the Democrats did.

Democrats on the committee welcomed the change in approach by the ranking GOP member.

"For years, too often we found ourselves wasting time with non-technical witnesses about whether it's a matter of scientific debate whether or not it would be a good thing if the Greenland Ice Sheet melted," said Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a physicist. "I was really thrilled to see some of the changes appearing in this committee. I'd also like to thank Ranking Member Lucas and my Republican colleagues for selecting Dr. Majkut as their witness for this hearing. He's someone with a Ph.D. in a relevant science and someone with views which are inside the scientific mainstream and that's refreshing."

Old (and Odd) Arguments Batted Down

Not every minority member on the committee followed Lucas's lead. Some of the older members, such as Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), relied on the old climate denying argument that, because other factors besides human activity caused warming 21,000 years ago, those are the factors driving changes now. (They're not.)Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas)brought up a period of warming in Greenland that was followed by a harsh freeze about 1,000 years ago, in an effort to prompt the expert panel to say that global warming might be a good thing.

Majkut, the GOP-invited expert, demurred. "What we do know is we built our society around the temperatures that we've encountered over the last 200, 300 years," he said, "We're fixing to change those temperatures quite a bit, and that rapid transition is the cause for concern."

In her written testimony, Kristie Ebi, an expert witness and director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at University of Washington, highlighted the vulnerabilitysome populations have to heat by mentioning that more than 700 children died from 1990 to 2014 because they were left in hot cars. Rep. Jim Baird (R-Ind.) suggested they may have perished because vehicles now are built "tighter" than before, allowing less air in.

Baird also speculated that species might adapt swiftly enough to climate change to avoid mass extinctions, despite vast scientific evidence to the contrary.

"The climate now is changing faster than it has been in 10,000 years, so it has to be a challenge for many of our plants and other species to try to evolve fast enough in the face of this rapid rate of change," Ebi responded.

Republicans Attacked the Green New Deal

Younger GOP members on the panel, such as Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, opened their questioning by saying they accepted climate change and, unlike their older colleagues, did not offer alternative theories.

But nearly all the GOP members used the hearing as an opportunity to bash the Green New Deal, a job creation and climate plan whose outlines were unveiled last week by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Ocasio-Cortez's office bungled the rollout of the project when it posted a meandering draft document with "Frequently Asked Questions" that said, among other things, that its goal was net-zero emissions rather than absolutely zero because "we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."

The GOP members of the Science Committee seized on elements of the FAQ to allege that the Democrats' solution to climate change was a socialist takeover of industries. Republican members also alleged that gasoline and electricity prices would skyrocket. The GOP has used such doomsday scenarios to great effect in the past, including to derail Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the last two times Congress was tasked with reining in greenhouse gases.

Democratic members did not address the apocalyptic predictions of their GOP colleagues. But Majkut, who described the Green New Deal as a broad progressive agenda with some climate policies attached to it, rebuffed the idea that broad-based efforts to cut emissions would throttle the economy.

"I think the intent is not to overly punish any particular class of people or any particular technology. It's to put in place a system we're all going to benefit from in the long term," Majkut said. "Frankly, I don't know if it will be too costly.

==

neglected

https://www.inverse.com/article/27842-climate-change-denier-nasa-congressional-hearing-harrison-schmitt

Eddie B J Chair:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13022019/congress-house-science-committee-climate-change-republicans-green-new-deal-niskanen

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/democrats-coalesce-energy-and-climate-message-ahead-2020-election

Democrats Coalesce on Energy and Climate Message Ahead of 2020 Election

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

In recent weeks, Democrats on the campaign trail and in Congress have moved towards a consensus message on a key campaign issue heading into the 2020 elections – climate change.  Culminating with the release of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s “Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future” (the “Biden Plan”) and originating with legislation in the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, the Democrats have now released details underpinning their most ambitious plans to date to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in the U.S. economy.  These actions shed light on how a potential Biden administration – and a Democratic Congress – might govern on the issues.

The former Vice President’s campaign released his clean energy plan ahead of a climate-focused speech on July 14th in Wilmington, Delaware.  Under the Biden Plan, the federal government would invest $2 trillion over Biden’s first term in office to promote American innovation and upgrade infrastructure across all sectors that contribute to global climate change, including electric power, transportation, industry, buildings, and agriculture.  Highlights of the plan include the following:

Electric Power Sector:  Achieve net-zero emissions in the power sector by 2035 by implementing an Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard (EECES) for utilities and grid operators, the most ambitious target year included in any Democratic plan to date for a net-zero emissions power sector.

Electric Vehicles:  Use federal government procurement power to upgrade the 3 million vehicles in the federal fleet to electric vehicles; make public investments in 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; and, negotiate new fuel economy standards that accelerate the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles.

Buildings: Cut the carbon footprint of the national building stock by 2035; set a net-zero emissions standard for all new commercial buildings by 2030; retrofit 4 million commercial buildings and weatherize 2 million homes in four years; and, create direct cash rebates and low-cost financing to upgrade and electrify home appliances.

Research and Development: Create a new Advanced Research Projects Agency on Climate (ARPA-C) focused on developing innovative technologies to achieve a 100% clean energy target; investing in research to bolster clean energy supply chains; and, leverage federal procurement to create demand for clean energy inputs.

Environmental Justice:  Ensure that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of overall benefits from clean energy and energy efficiency spending; create data-driven tools to identify disadvantaged communities most threatened by climate change and pollution; and, update existing federal programs to protect environmental justice communities.

The plan also includes expansive support for a clean energy workforce, a longstanding Democratic priority for an industry that has seen substantial job loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, the Biden Plan does not include any explicit near- or long-term ban on the production of fossil fuels or development of fossil fuel infrastructure, including hydraulic fracturing for natural gas – a priority as Biden seeks to win support from voters in natural gas-rich Pennsylvania in November. Biden has, however, supported a ban on fracking on federal lands.  That the progressive wing of the party is largely supportive of the Biden Plan is a notable sign of the united front Democrats are attempting to present to the voting public on this issue.

The Biden Plan has its roots in, and can be seen as the natural conclusion of, two years of legislative work by the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Since retaking the chamber after the 2018 midterms, House leadership under Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) directed each of the Committees of jurisdiction to develop legislation that would reduce GHG emissions within their jurisdiction in pursuit of a net-zero emission economy by 2050.  The House also created the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis which, although it would not have any legislative authority, was tasked with developing a report detailing climate change policy recommendations to Congress across all sectors of the economy.

Throughout the 116th Congress, each Committee in the House has held climate change hearings, and the House has considered or advanced broad measures in service of the 2050 goal of net-zero emissions across the economy:

Provisions from each of these bills were incorporated into the Moving Forward Act (H.R. 2), the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill passed by the House on July 1.  House Democrats have argued for clean energy infrastructure spending to stimulate the U.S. economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Moving Forward Act represents the opening position of the House in the event that the Senate passes its own infrastructure legislation.

Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis also released their long-awaited report, “Solving the Climate Crisis: The Congressional Action Plan for a Clean Energy Economy and a Healthy, Resilient, and Just America,” on June 30.  The 547-page report details policy recommendations for Congress to address climate change across every sector of the U.S. economy, drawing significantly from the aforementioned legislative efforts along with direct input from environmental and industry stakeholders.  Its most sweeping policy recommendations on a national scale include a Clean Energy Standard (CES), a Low Carbon Fuels Standard, and a price on carbon. It also calls for historic investments in clean energy infrastructure as well as research, development and deployment of low- and zero-carbon technologies.  Like the pledges made by the Biden campaign and those in existing House legislation, the Select Committee also emphasizes environmental justice and the creation of clean energy jobs throughout its Report.

Outlook

The synergies that exist between the Biden Plan, legislation introduced and considered by the House of Representatives, and the Select Committee’s report are indicative of how Democrats intend to set the agenda for dramatic action on climate change in 2021. Elements of the Biden Plan are expected to be incorporated in the Democratic party platform, which is being developed for ratification by the full Democratic convention next month. In particular, the House has laid out a stark contrast on energy and climate issues relative to their colleagues in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the sole broad legislative effort focused primarily on policies that support and promote research and development of energy technologies aimed at reducing emissions.  The prospects for Senate passage of that legislation are currently unclear.

Of course, the fate of any of these legislative efforts is tied to Democratic successes in November, not just for the White House but also in the Senate, where a Democratic majority will be required to bring sweeping climate change legislation to the floor. Should President Trump win reelection or if Republicans maintain the Senate majority, any action on climate change will be tempered from the ambitious plans Democrats have laid out over the past two years.   Entities involved in the energy and climate space should still be aware, however, that if Democrats are indeed able to win the White House and Senate and hold on to their majority in the House, there may be significant opportunities to pursue and shape transformative, long-lasting energy and climate policies.

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hope: 2018 blue wave --> chair, lamar is retiring

Assuming Republicans hold their majority in the House after the 2018 elections, Representative Frank Lucas (R–OK) would be next in line by seniority. Lucas, a former chairperson of the House agriculture committee who has served in the House since 1994, has also taken a hard line against government action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and been highly critical of EPA.

Other senior Republicans who could contend for the chair include Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R–CA), who has served on the panel for more than 3 decades and ran against Smith for its leadership slot in 2012, and Representative Mo Brooks (R–AL), who recently lost a bid for a Senate seat in Alabama. Brooks chaired the committee’s basic research panel as a freshman legislator in 2011–12, but has been much less involved in committee business since then.

A favorite among science lobbyists for the job is probably Representative Randy Hultgren (R–IL). Fourth in line by seniority, Hultgren is a strong fiscal and social conservative. But he’s also been a strong advocate for the physical sciences, a stance reflecting the importance of two Department of Energy national laboratories—Argonne and Fermi—to his district.

If Democrats take back control of the House, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX)would be first in line to claim the chair.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/house-science-chair-retire-congress

==

https://science.house.gov/about/members

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Science,_Space_and_Technology

There are five subcommittees in the 115th Congress.

SubcommitteeChair[8]Ranking Member
EnergyRandy Weber (R-TX)Marc Veasey (D-TX)
EnvironmentAndy Biggs (R-AZ)Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR)
OversightDarin Lahood (R-IL)Don Beyer (D-VA)
Research and TechnologyBarbara Comstock (R-VA)Dan Lipinski (D-IL)
SpaceBrian Babin (R-TX)Ami Bera (D-CA)

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115th gop

dems

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https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/former-noaa-scientist-confirms-colleagues-manipulated-climate-records

off BS

Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records

==

http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/06/21/what-media-should-know-about-house-science-committee-members-defending-exxon/210539

What Media Should Know About The House Science Committee Members Defending Exxon

Research ››› June 21,2016   ANDREW SEIFTER

Thirteen Republican members of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, led by Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), are wrongly accusing 17 attorneys general and eight environmentally focused organizations of trying to “silence speech” by ExxonMobiland other companies that may have intentionally misled shareholders and the public about climate change. Media coverage of the committee members’ actions should note that they have taken a combined $3.4 million from the fossil fuel industry -- and that all 13 members have received money directly from Exxon. Moreover, Smith has a track record of baselessly attacking climate scientists, and the committee members announced their efforts on the same day that Exxon-funded fronts groups made the same deceptive “free speech” allegation in a full-page ad in The New York Times.

House Science Committee Members Wrongly Accuse Attorneys General And Environmentally Focused Groups Of Trying To “Silence Speech”

Committee Members Claim Attorneys General Are Trying To “Deprive” Exxon And Other Companies Of “First Amendment Rights.” The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology announced in a May 18 press release that 13 of its members had sent letters requesting documents from “17 state attorneys general and eight environmental activist organizations” related to their “coordinated efforts to deprive companies, nonprofit organizations, scientists and scholars of their First Amendment rights.” 

The press release added that the letters state that the committee is “concerned that these efforts to silence speech are based on political theater rather than legal or scientific arguments.” The letters went to the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington. 

The committee also sent letters to 350.org; the Climate Accountability Institute; the Climate Reality Project; Greenpeace; Pawa Law Group, P.C.; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Rockefeller Family Fund; and theUnion of Concerned Scientists. After many of the targeted attorneys general and organizations stated that they were refusing to comply with the committee members’ request, Smith and the other committee members “doubl[ed] down” on their demand for documentsfrom the attorneys general on June 17, as The Hill reported. [House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology press release, 5/18/16; 5/18/16; 5/18/16; 6/17/16; InsideClimate News, 6/2/16; The Hill, 6/20/16]

AGs Are Actually Investigating Whether Exxon Intentionally Deceived The Public To Protect Its Profits. Contrary to the House science committee members’ claims, the attorneys general are seeking to determine whether Exxon and other companies knew the reality of climate change but publicly sowed doubt about climate science in order to protect their profits. Reports from InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon’s own scientists had confirmed by the early 1980s that fossil fuel pollution was causing climate change, yet Exxon funded organizations that helped manufacture doubt about the causes of climate change for decades afterward. This has prompted the attorneys general in New York, California, Massachusetts, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to each launch investigations into the Exxon scandal.

Most recently, an even larger coalition of attorneys general has committed to holding fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, accountable if they obfuscated climate change research in order to protect their financial interests.The outside groups are being targeted because they participated in a series of meetings about holding fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change, beginning with a 2012 workshop in La Jolla, CA. But as The New York Times noted, contrary to claims by the science committee members and other Exxon defenders that the groups are engaged in a conspiracy, a 36-page report about the workshop has long been “readily available online,” and “groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists have been open about their collaboration and consultation with attorneys general.” [Media Matters, 3/11/16; Media Matters, 3/15/16; Los Angeles Times, 10/23/15; InsideClimate News, 9/16/15; 3/2/16; U.S. News & World Report, 3/29/16; InsideClimate News, 3/30/16; U.S. News & World Report, 3/29/16; The New York Times, 5/23/16]

House Science Committee Members Defending Exxon Have Received Millions From Fossil Fuel Industry -- And All 13 Took Money Directly From Exxon

The 13 Science Committee Members Defending Exxon Have Received Over $3.4 Million From The Fossil Fuel Industry, Including Over $126,000 From Exxon.

The House science committee letters were signed by the following members: Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Vice Chairman Frank Lucas (R-OK), Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI), Rep. Dana Rohrbacher(R-CA), Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL), Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK),Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), and Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA).

Together, these members of Congress have received $3,411,173 in career contributions from the oil and gas, coal mining, and electric utilities industries, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Moreover, all 13 committee members have received money directly from Exxon, totally $126,020. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith and Vice Chairman Frank Lucas have each received over $760,000 from the fossil fuel industry and at least $15,000 from Exxon. [Media Matters, 6/21/16]

DeSmogBlog: Past And Present Smith Staffers Also Have Ties To Exxon. In a June 21 article, DeSmogBlog noted that several “people working for Smith, both past and present,” have ties to Exxon:

Lamar Smith's senior legislative aide, Scott Ferguson, went on two trips funded by the American Exploration and Production Council, one in 2014 and one in 2015. One of the Council's members is XTO Energy, the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)-focused subsidiary of ExxonMobil.

[...]

Smith's former communications director, Sally-Shannon Birkel, now serves as senior manager of media relations for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by both the [Koch brothers] and ExxonMobil.

[...]

Another former Smith communications director, Brad Bennett, left Smith's office and eventually transitioned into gigs at both Hill and Knowlton (a PR firm with roots in tobacco industry denial tactics which did PR on behalf of America's Natural Gas Alliance, ANGA) and DCI Group, the latter of which has key Exxon ties and was subpoenaed in April by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Attorneys General probe. [DeSmogBlog, 6/21/16]

Committee Chairman Lamar Smith Harassed And Falsely Attacked Climate Scientists

The Guardian’s John Abraham: Smith Is A “Climate Scientist Witch Hunter.” In October, Smith requested internal communications from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and baselessly alleged that NOAA was manipulating temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, NOAA had already made the data Smith was challenging available to the public online, and the agency routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors. Smith’s attacks on NOAA prompted The Guardian’s John Abraham to describe Smith as a “climate scientist witch hunter” who “harasse[d] scientists who debunked a favorite denier argument.” [Media Matters, 11/3/15; The Guardian, 11/11/15]

Exxon-Funded Front Groups Joined Science Committee To Simultaneously Attack Attorneys General

https://cei.org/blog/nyt-ad-abuse-power-free-speech

Front Groups Authored Front-Page NY Times Ad With Same Spurious "First Amendment" Claims. On the same day that the House science committee announced the actions of the 13 committee members, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sponsored a full-page ad in The New York Times alleging that the attorneys general seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable intend to “silence the speech of more than 100 businesses, nonprofits, and private individuals who question the AGs’ positions on climate change.” CEI claimed that the ad “features signatures from 43 organizations, legal experts, and individuals who value Americans’ First Amendment rights and believe they should be protected.” However, according to The New York Times, the Climate Investigations Center (CIC) has documented that CEI received “about $2 million” from Exxon during the time period when Exxon was “funding organizations that undercut climate science.” In total, CIC reported that the ad’s signers have “received $10.1 Million dollars from Exxon, ExxonMobil and the ExxonMobil Foundation from 1997 through 2014,” including “over $2.2 Million in climate-specific funding from Exxon.” CIC also noted that “several of the signatories were part of the infamous” 1998 Global Climate Science Communications Team, which “crafted a multimillion dollar plan to challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ of climate science and replace it with ‘uncertainty.’” [Competitive Enterprise Institute, 5/18/16; The New York Times, 6/16/16; Climate Investigations Center, 5/19/16]

Note: Media Matters' Climate and Energy Program has received funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, one of the foundations targeted by the House science committee members

lamar

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-lawmakers-whether-epa-staff-influenced-glyphosate-review-194036039.html?ref=gs

U.S. lawmakers probe EPA staff over possible bias in herbicide review

June 7, 2016

yahoo news oddly void on names: REUters

what's wrong w/ EPA infl WHO?!

By P.J. Huffstutter

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers are investigating whether U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff influenced the World Health Organization's review of glyphosate and its finding that the herbicide probably causes cancer, according to a letter sent to the agency on Tuesday.

The letter from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is part of an ongoing investigation into the agency after the EPA posted and withdrew an internal report that said glyphosate was not cancer causing.

One question that lawmakers are trying to answer, according to legislative sources, is whether EPA staff allowed personal bias to color the agency's scientific review of glyphosate, the chemical in Monsanto Co's Roundup herbicide.

Some EPA staff participated in both the U.S. review and the WHO review. While the committee's line of investigation was not clear, lawmakers cited the contradictory findings of the two reviews.

Those reviews were by the EPA's cancer assessment review committee or CARC and the WHO's cancer arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer or IARC.

“Given the apparent contradictions of the CARC and IARC findings for glyphosate ..., the committee has concerns about the integrity" of the WHO review, the role of EPA officials in that review and their influence on the outcome of the EPA study, the committee's letter to the EPA seen by Reuters said.

According to the letter, lawmakers want congressional staff to interview four top EPA officials who were involved in one or both reviews of glyphosate.

An EPA spokeswoman said Tuesday the agency had received the letter, was reviewing it and would respond.

In an earlier letter EPA sent to the committee, the agency said that publishing the cancer assessment review committee's report was an accident and that the cancer review was still ongoing.

The EPA said it was "currently reviewing our standard operating procedures for the release of documents to avoid the inadvertent release of pre-decisional information in the future."

The congressional committee began its investigation into the EPA last month after the report by the EPA's cancer assessment review committee became briefly public.

The report found that glyphosate was "not likely" to be carcinogenic to humans. It also appeared to dispute the IARC report and questioned its analysis.

The WHO's IARC last year classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."

The House's Agriculture Committee previously said it too was examining the agency's review of glyphosate and atrazine, another chemical used in agricultural herbicides.

The Agriculture Committee also wanted to know what steps still needed to be taken to finalize and issue the glyphosate report, which it had expected in July 2015.

(Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Cynthia Osterman)

==

Letter to 350.org

Letter to Climate Accountability Institute

Letter to The Climate Reality Project

Letter to Greenpeace

Letter to Pawa Law Group, P.C.

Letter to The Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Letter to Rockefeller Family Fund

Letter to Union of Concerned Scientists

==

https://science.house.gov/news/letters/gop-member-letter-enviromental-activist-organizations-coordinated-efforts-deprive

lamar smith

On Wednesday, 13 House Representatives sitting on the Science, Space and Technology Committee sent letters to 17 state attorneys general and eight non-governmental organizations, including Greenpeace USA. These letters come as a reaction to the announcement by the attorneys general to coordinate efforts around climate change related actions, following the NGOs’ revelations that ExxonMobil implemented a colossal climate denial operation to deceive its shareholders and the public for decades.

America’s least-respected politicians have now courageously stepped up to defend one of America’s most-hated corporations from scrutiny. If these representatives, who have historically low approval ratings, think they’re somehow helping Exxon’s public image with this nonsense, then they need to take some time away from lobbyist mixers and meet the people. American citizens believe in climate change and want a better future. Exxon knows now and has known for decades that its work has contributed to catastrophic climate change. The issue here is whether or not it lied to its shareholders and the public.

If Exxon knew its work made climate change worse and hid this information for profit, it should be held accountable, not protected by elected officials who are there to represent the American people, not corporations. Since 1999, these 13 elected officials have been paid millions in campaign contributions from coal, oil and gas companies, so this letter is more proof that the system works—for corporations.

The list of groups that received the letterincludes 350.org, Climate Accountability Institute, Climate Reality Project, Greenpeace USA, Pawa Law Group PC, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists. The 17 attorneys general are the elected officials of California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia, Vermont and Washington State.

==

Lamar Smith, Texas*

Frank D. Lucas, Oklahoma**

F. James Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin+

Dana Rohrabacher, California

Randy Neugebauer, Texas

Michael T. McCaul, Texas

Mo Brooks, Alabama

Randy Hultgren, Illinois

Bill Posey, Florida

Thomas Massie, Kentucky

Jim Bridenstine, Oklahoma

Randy Weber, Texas

John R. Moolenaar, Michigan

Steve Knight, California

Brian Babin, Texas

Bruce Westerman, Arkansas

Barbara Comstock, Virginia

Gary Palmer, Alabama

Barry Loudermilk, Georgia

Ralph Lee Abraham, Louisiana

Darin LaHood, Illinois 

Vacant

*Full Committee Chair

+Chairman Emeritus

**Vice Chair/Committee

==

month, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted along party lines to cut funding allocations that enable NASA to study changing climate patterns through their Earth Science program. This week, House Republicans voted 217 to 205 to take a second swipe at the government-funded study of global warming, this time by seeking to impose regulations on how the National Science Foundation utilizes its money, via the pending America Competes Reauthorization Act.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/congressional-witch-hunt-against-noaa-scientists

we have long been suspicious of the House Science Committee’s expanded subpoena power. The evidence now demonstrates that the committee is using this new authority not to conduct effective oversight but to harass those who produce robust scientific analysis it refuses to accept.

The committee is harassing individuals, launching an investigation into the actions of a climate scientist who, in the words of my colleague Andrew Rosenberg, had the “temerity to express his views that fossil fuel companies should be held accountable for climate change.” Although subpoenas have not been formally issued, an investigation has begun.

he committee is now stepping up its harassment of government agencies. On October 13, the committee subpoenaed nearly seven years of internal deliberations and communications among scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including “all documents and communications” related to NOAA’s measurement of our climate.

RELATED: Is the Federal Govt. Harassing and Censoring Its Own Scientists for Studying Ties Between Pesticides and Bee Deaths?

“All documents and communications” would presumably include emails, preliminary drafts, peer review comments, notes,  audio recordings, and a treasure trove of other material. This would mean thousands upon thousands of records for employees to identify and go through and analyze for no clearly stated purpose.

NOAA was given two weeks to comply.

Some will say that the committee is right, that we should have access to the data. But this, of course, is not about data. The data is already public. In ablistering letter, ranking member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) hit the nail on the head:

However, obtaining _{all }_of the data and methods used in this study seemingly was not enough for the majority. You also demanded internal communications by NOAA scientists regarding their scientific research. NOAA, rightfully, has been reluctant to waste their time and resources, not to mention break confidence with their superb research scientists by responding to this demand…

I cannot help but note that your requests in this case echo the tactics of notable climate change skeptics, who frequently submit similar FOIA requests of climate scientists in both the federal government and in state universities. One of the most publicized occasions of harassment occurred when then-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought email communications of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann.

The original UVA case was even worse, as Mr. Cuccinelli issued Civil Investigative Demands—essentially subpoenas—under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act for this information. At the time, even some climate change skeptics called his move a “witch hunt.” The American Tradition Institute, whose lawyers were recently found to be paid by the coal industry, followed with open records requests for the exact same information.

According to Rep. Johnson, the House Science Committee has made no specific allegations of fraud or scientific misconduct. It’s just fishing, and in the process, harassment.

“You don’t become a biologist to get rich or powerful,” Canadian scientist Jay Fitzsimmons told me in the wake of this week’s Canadian election results. “You become a biologist because you love nature and science. To work under a government that tries to silence scientists is pretty demoralizing.”

The same holds true in the United States. Yet Congress routinely holds the budget hostage, creating uncertainty for agency staff and extensive planning for government shutdowns even when they don’t occur. It consistently asks agencies to do more with fewer resources....

==

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/highlight/house-science-committee-more-worried-about-aliens-than-climate-change/

2/15

3 on seti, lamarr smith 2 on GW

==

see also comm on sci house

see BJ, most staff quit, replaced by ff lobbyists, when smith took over

https://science.house.gov/subcommittee-environment-0

Subcommittees

Subcommittee on Energy

Subcommittee on Space

Subcommittee on Research and Technology

Subcommittee on Oversight

Subcommittee on Environment

Republican Members

David Schweikert (R-Arizona), Chairman

F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wisconsin)

Dana Rohrabacher (R-California)

Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas)

Paul Broun (R-Georgia)

David Schweikert (R-Arizona)

Jim Bridenstine, Oklahoma, Vice Chair

Randy Weber (R-Texas)

Democrat Members

Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon), Ranking Member

Julia Brownley (D-California)

Donna F. Edwards (D-Maryland)

Mark Takano (D-California)

Alan Grayson (D-Florida)

Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts)  

* The Chairman and Ranking Minority Member serve as ex-officio Members of all Subcommittees

How One GOP-Controlled Committee Is Waging A War On Science

The American Independent Institute  |  By Brad Johnson

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/24/house-science-committee_n_5525609.html?1403707503

At a March 26 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Republican congressmen took turns attacking President Obama's top science advisor, John Holdren. On climate change, their statements became increasingly heated, accusatory, and bizarre.

Southern California conservative Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) challenged Holdren on the fact that about 97 percent of the world's practicing climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible for climate change. "Why can't anybody admit that you've got a group of people putting out a bogus figure here?" he charged.

Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) noted that the earth had warmed in between ice ages, without any people around. So how could humans be blamed for the current warming?

"Just because we're alive now," he reasoned, "the tectonic plate shifts aren't gonna stop, the hurricanes [and] tsunamis aren't gonna stop, the asteroid strikes aren't gonna stop."

Finally, Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), an air-conditioning company founder from Pearland, Texas, noted to Holdren, a climate scientist and MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient, that "I may want to get your cell phone, because if we go through cycles of global warming and then back to global cooling, I need to know when to buy my long coat on sale."

Soon after, a Scientific American headline concluded that the committee was becoming "a national embarrassment."

Since Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) took over as chairmanof the House Science Committee in the beginning of 2013, the GOP majority has been waging a war. Its enemies list is long: The Environmental Protection Agency. The National Science Foundation. Rules that prevent industries from polluting the air and groundwater. Climate scientists studying the effects of a warming planet. The very notion of non-politicized, peer-reviewed scientific inquiry.

For years, the House Science Committee was a quiet congressional backwater. Typically, its most contentious battles were over the future of American space exploration.

Smith has changed that. The traditionally collegial committee has been pursuing a more aggressive and party-driven agenda –- one that's closely aligned with the GOP’s relentless promotion of the fossil-fuel industry. Though critics say Smith's campaign has been scattershot and at least somewhat dysfunctional, they're alarmed about what could result from the various bills he's pushed over the last 18 months.

Stocked with corporate-trained lobbyists in key staff positions, the committee's majority has repeatedly attacked the EPA from several different vantage points. The committee participated in the congressional GOP's efforts to block or limit virtually all regulations on coal, oil and natural gas facilities – including a reinvigorated effort to delegitimize and ultimately scrap the most important existing such laws like the Clean Air Act by tarnishing seminal studies conducted by researchers with Harvard University and the American Cancer Society. After encountering resistance to that effort, committee Republicans went much further by pushing a bill that woulddisallow the EPA from using any confidential data or information – a measure seemingly designed to completely disrupt its ability to protect the public.E&E?

The GOP majority likewise has taken the lead in efforts to place tight reins on the National Science Foundation by attempting to exert political control over federally funded scientific research, an effort that has science advocates up in arms.

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr1029  ]

Through the "EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act," the committee's majority is trying to alter the way the EPA selects and uses its internal Science Advisory Boards, which are meant to provide independent review of the science conducted by the agency. One of the bill's main consequences, a committee Democrat concluded, would be to ensure "an overrepresentation of industry voices" on the panels.

And at every turn, GOP committee members have been working to deny the reality of global warming –- not surprising, given that at least 20 of the committee's 22 Republicans are either skeptics or outright deniers of the notion that the world's climate is steadily warming and that human activity is playing a significant role.

(Smith does have a penchant for at least one branch of science. Late last year, he hosted a hearing that investigated the possibility of life in outer space entitled "Astrobiology: Search for Biosignatures in our Solar System and Beyond.")

The majority of Smith’s attacks on science use the language of scientific ethics. He recently told the San Antonio Express-News that he employs the gavel to “make sure that the president's policies are based upon good science – not science fiction.” Smith used the same “science fiction” line in a February email interview about his campaign against what he has dubbed “secret science.” He noted, for example, that “[r]equiring transparency is a basic tenet of good government.”

Yet critics –- and there are many –- take fundamental issue with Smith's notion of good government.

The pushback from the committee's top-ranking Democratic, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), has been unusually impassioned, even in this hyper-partisan –- and on the Republican side, extreme –- era in the House. In an email interview, she said she's noticed a shift even further to the right under Smith, even though he took over from the conservative former GOP chairman, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas). Six of the 22 Republicans on the committee hail from the Lone Star State –- more than one in four.

After Republicans took control in 2011, "the Committee became more partisan and more focused on issues that appeal to the conservative base rather than on the research, technology advancement, and education issues that were the primary focus areas during the four years Democrats controlled the Committee," Johnson said. "Unfortunately, that change has become even more pronounced in the last year. In particular, the steady drumbeat of attacks against the EPA’s efforts to protect public health and the environment have become louder and louder over this time."

During an April 28 speech before the National Academy of Sciences, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said she believed that by vilifying the work of reputable scientists and the EPA, critics of the agency are "looking to cloud the science with uncertainty – to keep EPA from doing the very job that Congress gave us to do."

Said McCarthy: "You can’t just claim the science isn’t real when it doesn’t align well with your political or financial interests"

Industry Ties

When the Republican Party rode the Tea Party wave in 2010 to retake control of the House of Representatives, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the oldest member of the House at 86, became the new head of the House Committee on Science and Technology. Only two years later, the elderly Hall passed the chairman’s gavel to fellowTexan Smith, the former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who helped found the House Tea Party Caucus. Smith won the chair after a brief but public battle with other senior Republican members of the committee, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a former Science Committee chairman, and Rohrabacher of California, the bombastic global-warming denier who has sat on the Science Committee since entering Congress in 1989. (Rohrabacher was also an also-ran against Hall.)

Smith’s previous stint as Judiciary chair was ill-starred, as the long-serving congressman with a reputation as a moderate, corporate-friendly politician became embroiled in the catastrophic collapse of the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bipartisan intellectual-property legislation that led Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and hundreds of other key Internet players to turn their sites black in protest.

Despite that misstep, there were expectations around Capitol Hill that Smith, whose district includes small pieces of San Antonio and Austin and big parts of Texas Hill Country, would bring an intelligent, sober, and competent –- albeit partisan –- hand to the Science Committee.

Those expectations have been shattered, say numerous lobbyists and committee staffers on both sides of the aisle, most of whom have asked not to be identified by name. The most frequent sentiment, more than dismay or anger, was bafflement, as if their teetotaling, bachelor uncle showed up for Christmas dinner drunk and accompanied by a mail-order bride.

“The Science Committee is totally dysfunctional,” a scientific society lobbyist said on background during a legislative markup in the committee’s formal hearing room. He complained not just of partisanship, but of a lack of competence among the majority staff. A frequent sentiment expressed to me in interviews was exasperation with hasty scheduling, slip-shod legislative drafts, and haphazard research. “They’re too dumb to be evil,”one Democratic staffer told me in his representative’s cramped office.

This internal chaos is a consequence of Smith’s work to establish his imprint on the committee. Over 2013, with Smith’s chief deputy for the science committee, GOP policy director Chris Shank, managing the process, most of the existing Republican staffers left –- some amicably, others considerably less so. Of the 37 staffers on the Republican side under Hall, at least 27 have gone since Smith took over.

Despite Smith’s professed commitment to transparency, this staff shuffle had to be pieced together from a combination of public records and interviews. Under Hall, the full staff listing was published on the committee website. All links to those pages were removed when Smith became chair.

The stonewalling of the public is no problem for those within many of Washington's already-powerful fossil fuel industry lobby shops -- they can just call on former colleagues now working on the committee.

Examples of the revolving door abound: former chief counsel Margaret Caravelli had joined the committee from the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association; she is now on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee staff. Dan Byers, the Energy and Environment Subcommittee staff director, went to the U.S. Chamberof Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy Institute, its fossil-industry lobbying wing. Before Smith became committee chair, Environment Subcommittee staffer Clinton Woods came from the energy task force of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, where he helped the American Gas Association draft a report on “EPA’s hostility to fossil fuels.”

The committee's majority is now also home to a new generation of lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. After the Energy and Environment subcommittee was split into two, it gained two new staff directors, Stephen Sayle for Energy and Allyne Todd Johnston for Environment. Given their backgrounds, the subcommittees could more appropriately be named Fracking and Coal.

Sayle is a prominent fossil-industry lobbyist who got his start with Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas). In the 1990s, he was the chief counsel for Barton’s investigations into EPA fine particle air quality rules. While a top lobbyist at the Dutko and Dow Lohnes lobbying shops, Sayle’s clients included a cavalcade of oil, gas, and coal companies and front groups: Duke Energy, Cinergy, Chevron, Iroquois Gas, National Grid, Calpine, ITC, Tenaska, PSEG, Tesoro, the American Chemical Council, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and the Electric Power Supply Association. (Sayle also represented the Environmental Working Group, an environmental health research and advocacy group, on toxic-chemical regulation in 2010.) Sayle was one of The Hill’s top lobbyists of 2012 for his “background on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Sayle’s return to the committee is somewhat surprising –- the energy subcommittee primarily has jurisdiction over the Department of Energy science labs, which focus on nuclear research, advanced biofuels, battery technology, and climate research -– not well aligned with Sayle’s focus on natural-gas and petrochemical lobbying.

However, the explosive growth of fracking in the nation in the past decade has raised serious new scientific questions about the risks and benefits of this formerly obscure method of extracting natural gas. How the federal government responds to scientific evidence of fracking’s threat to water supplies and our climate is a multi-billion-dollar question. That Republicans would add a fracking lobbyist to the House Science Committee is hardly surprising: Obama’s new Secretary of Energy is Ernest Moniz, a natural-gas-industry-funded scientist expected to steer the agency towards supporting oil and gas development.

Johnston came to the House Science Committee in 2013 from the staff of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), where he was the chief climate policy advisor for the senator, a climate-science conspiracy theorist. Prior to that, Johnston was the Director of Air Quality for the coal industry’s primary trade group, the National Mining Association, from 2005 to 2007. During his tenure, he worked as a representative of the “Coarse Particle Coalition,” a group of gravel, cement and minerals groups that aimed to block scientifically backed soot standards during the George W. Bush administration.

Johnston then joined Sen. George Voinovich’s (R-Ohio) staff, drafting climate legislation in 2007 that supported a continued increase in greenhouse pollution and massive subsidies for the coal industry. In 2011 he moved to Inhofe’s staff, replacing Tom Hassenboehler when that operative moved over to America’s Natural Gas Alliance.

Johnston and Sayle declined comment for this story. According to committee Republican press aide Zachary Kurz, the committee has a policy of not making staffers available for public comment.

Environmentalists say industry groups are taking advantage of the key staff placements to help drive their plans.

“Industrial polluters are using the back rooms of Congress in this traditionally sleepy committee to assert an extreme corporate agenda,” clean-air advocate John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council argued in a telephone interview. “If you connect the dots, the agenda is to systematically bias the system, whether by weakening conflict of interest standards when corporations serve on scientific advisory bodies or thwarting regulations that address industrial pollution.”

The ties between the committee's Republicans and oil, gas and coal groups run deeper than staffing, of course. Press accounts in recent years have noted that fossil fuel interests have donated large amounts to Republicans on the House Science Committee.

Smith has received at least $10,000 from the Kochs, and a whopping $550,000 from the oil and gas industries over the course of his career, for example. Rohrabacher has received $189,444 in campaign contributions from the energy industry, including $91,294 from the oil and gas industry, over his career. And according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, Weber has received $10,000 from Koch Industries and another $45,000 from the energy sector in campaign contributions, the vast majority -– $39,000 –- coming from oil and gas.

The Republicans have “been unabashed in attacking anyone who points out the negative effects of fossil fuel development,” Eddie Bernice Johnson said in an interview. “It has been obvious since the first day of the 112th Congress that the oil and gas and coal industries have an outsized influence over the Republican agenda.”

In our February interview, Smith took umbrage at the assertion that he or his GOP colleagues are beholden to corporate interests, or that the panel's majority is somehow anti-science.

"The Committee conducts objective oversight and should not be influenced by either environmental or energy lobbyists," said Smith. "My goal as Chairman is to promote the discovery of science, exploration of space and development of new technologies. This will increase our nation’s productivity, improve Americans’ standard of living and create new jobs."

Secret Science

Since taking over as committee chairman, Smith gained the most attention after he subpoenaed the EPA on Aug.1 of last year for data collected from air pollution studies from the 1970s. He argued that the data from the seminal Harvard Six Cities Study and another sponsored by the American Cancer Society, known as the Cancer Prevention Study II, need to be made public so that it can be analyzed again, because of the costs associated with the regulations the studies have helped spur.

Smith tried to preemptively justify his move in a Wall Street Journal op-ed a few days before the committee issued the subpoena, headlined “The EPA’s Game of Secret Science.”

“Virtually every major EPA air-quality regulation under President Obama has been justified by citing two sets of decades-old data from the Harvard Six Cities Study and the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Study II,” wrote Smith in the July 29, 2013 column.

Yet despite two years worth of letters to EPA administrators, Smith said, President Obama and the EPA were "unwilling" to reveal the underlying personal health data the studies used to justify a multibillion-dollar regulatory agenda. "The federal government has no business justifying regulations with secret information,” he wrote.

Reactions from the committee's Democrats was impassioned. "You are abusing Congressional power to harass the EPA administrator. You are undermining our legitimate scientific research enterprise. You are violating the trust that hundreds of thousands of research volunteers placed in our country's premier research institutions," wrote Johnson in an Aug. 6 letter to Smith. "And for what purpose? To provide human health data to tobacco industry consultants? If you continue on this path, you will cause irreparable harm to our Committee and our country."

Smith’s campaign against the EPA's “secret science” has involved multiple hearings, the first subpoenas issued by the Science Committee in living memory, and draft legislation that could shut down the agency.

Smith is challenging the process by which the United States government acts to protect the health of its citizens from industrial pollution, calling into question the consensus position of the nation’s scientific and medical establishment on the risks of smog, soot, and greenhouse pollution. If he's right, then the era of clean-air regulation that began with the enactment of the Clean Air Act in 1970 has relied on scientific fraud and misconduct on an epic scale.

To gauge the validity of Smith's assertions, it's imperative to look at the decade the world kindled to the idea that its air was dirty: the 1950s.

Speizer's Responsibility

Sometime during Dwight Eisenhower's second presidential term, a medical student named Frank Speizer pulled up to a stoplight in Los Angeles in his state-issued automobile, emblazoned with a California health agency logo. A pedestrian knocked on his window.

“When are you going to stop air pollution?” the man asked.

The 1950s was the decade of a global awakening about air pollution. In 1952, the Great Smog of London, a pea-soup miasma of polluted air, sickened more than 100,000 people in five days. Medical researchers found that coal and vehicular pollution had caused somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 deaths in the city. In response, England passed the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1958.

Meanwhile, the post-war economic boom in the United States was adding millions of cars to the hundreds of thousands of miles of new freeways and highways. Factories and coal-fired power plants were bringing economic prosperity but also dumping waste products into the nation’s water and air with catastrophic consequences.

Speizer started working on air pollution-related cases in 1958, while treating pulmonary function ailments in veterans in Los Angeles. He would go to hospital wards and see patients dying of respiratory diseases. He saw it as his responsibility not only to offer them treatment, but also find out why these people weren’t part of the population that was aging healthily.

As Speizer told me in his cozy Harvard School of Public Health office, “I’m a doctor and that’s my job -– to take care of people and find out why they get sick.”

Over the next fifty years, Speizer would become one of the most influential epidemiologists in the world. He is renowned not only for his work on air pollution but also for founding the Nurses’ Health Study, the landmark study that uncovered the risks of cigarettes and oral contraceptives to women’s health. His research, combined with that of thousands of other doctors and scientists, has since prevented the suffering and untimely death of millions.

In the late 1950s, smoggy air blanketed Los Angeles. “Our air pollution test was checking if you can see the mountains, which turns out to be a pretty good measure of fine particulate pollution actually.”

Speizer’s work joined a growing body of evidence showing that coal-fired power plants, factories, and vehicles produced pollution that harmed public health.

It was another decade before the United States was to pass the Clean Air of 1970, which established guidelines for the new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop scientifically grounded air pollution limits. A year later, in 1971, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus announced the first national standards for sulfur oxides, particulate matter (soot), carbon monoxide, photochemical oxidants, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons to protect vulnerable Americans.

Ruckelshaus cautioned the standards he established would likely be found wanting, because they reflected “the outer limits of our capability to measure connections between levels of pollution and effects on man.”

In 1973, a blue-ribbon commission of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences called for research into the health impacts of the nation’s expected switch from oil to coal in the wake of the Arab oil embargo.

Speizer, by then a Harvard School of Public Health researcher, joined pediatrician Benjamin Ferris to propose to the health sciences agency an ambitious, long-term study comparing the impacts of air pollution in six different American cities. Ferris had done groundbreaking work exposing the deadly impact of the sulfur dioxide emissions of a wood pulp mill in Berlin, New Hampshire, on the health of its residents. (Ferris had initially wanted to study the health impacts on the factory’s workers, but the mill owners refused him access, so he studied the entire community instead.)

It's unlikely Speizer and Ferris had any idea of the impact their study would generate – or the blowback from an emerging national right-wing power structure and its corporate backers.

Six Cities

The Harvard Six Cities study, as it became known, involved 8,111 participants ages 25 to 74 in six U.S. cities (St. Louis; Topeka, Kansas; Watertown, Mass.; Harriman, Tenn.; Steubenville, Ohio; and Portage, Wisc.) who filled out a detailed medical questionnaire and also underwent a test of their lung vitals. Follow-up questionnaires were sent every year. With parental consent, groups of school-age children were examined in a similar way. The study was funded in part by the health sciences agency, which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, the EPA, and the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-industry think tank.

Within a dozen years, the Harvard Six Cities researchers found that life expectancy was two years shorter in the dirtiest city than the cleanest, with a linear relationship found between air pollution and mortality in all six cities. They published these results in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“After adjusting for smoking and other risk factors, we observed statistically significant and robust associations between air pollution and mortality,” the researchers wrote, adding their findings to the “large and growing body of literature that documents the adverse health effects associated with particulate air pollution.”

The industries that produced the pollution in question quickly struck back. Researchers funded by the Electric Power Research Institute, the American Iron and Steel Institute and American Petroleum Institute immediately demanded access to the medical data for their own re-analysis; using different methodologies, they found little-to-no connection between particulate air pollution and public health. (These same researchers have done work paid for by the asbestos industry questioning the danger of asbestos, and the liquor industry questioning the health risks of alcohol.)

At the time, other long-term medical “cohort” studies –- surveys about the histories of specific population segments -– were already underway, which could be examined independently for the effects of air-pollution on cardiopulmonary disease and mortality. The most comprehensive of these studies, which remains the most thorough, was conducted by the American Cancer Society, starting in 1982.

The study includes confidential questionnaires for about 1.2 million Americans in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, including personal and family medical histories, menstrual and reproductive histories, drug use and dietary habits. The cancer society has collected blood and tissue samples from over half of its survey group, and has also collected mortality and cause of death information for the 491,188 deaths that have occurred between 1982 and 2006 among the participants.

Brigham Young University researcher Arden Pope independently confirmed the Harvard Six Studies findings in 1995, by comparing EPA air pollution data for 151 U.S. cities against the ACS study’s medical records. “Increased mortality is associated with sulfate and fine particulate air pollution at levels commonly found in U.S. cities,” Pope and his co-authors wrote in the American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine.

Smith’s claim that the EPA air-quality rules are justified solely on these two landmark studies is false. Other researchers from the Health Effects Institute -– an independent research institution jointly funded by EPA and the automotive industry in the 1980s to resolve similar disputes about diesel pollution -– conducted re-analyses of the results in multiple studies, also confirming the Harvard Six Cities findings. Over the following twenty years, there have since been further reanalyses and confirmations of these studies conducted by the health effects group and other institutions.

Meanwhile, laboratory research found cardiovascular effects in animals from inhaled pollutants. Now, the evidence supporting new limits on soot pollution included not only a broad array of epidemiological work but medical proof of how inhaled soot damaged the lungs, heart, and circulatory system.

The toll on American lives was enormous.

“The city-by-city analysis estimates that approximately 64,000 people may die prematurely from heart and lung disease each year due to particulate air pollution. Lives are not just being shortened by days or weeks, but by an average of 1 to 2 years in the most polluted areas,” Deborah Shprentz wrote in report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, published in May 1996.

Finally, the EPA during the Clinton Administration began moving toward establishing limits on sulfur dioxide and fine-particulate pollution based on this research.

It was then that the Koch brothers joined the fray.

This story was supported by The American Independent Institute. It is the first in a three-part series.

3 of 3

This is the third in a three-part series. Read the first story here and the second here.

About 97 percent of active climate scientists believe that climate change is real and dangerous and that human activity is a significant cause.

Almost as high a percentage of the Republicans serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology – 91 percent – disbelieve the notion, either in part or in full. Twenty of 22 GOP members of the committee, our research has found, aren't just unwilling to come to grips with the reality of man-made global warming. Most are clearly hostile to the notion.

In early May, the federal government produced its Third National Climate Assessment. More than 300 experts contributed to the report, which was sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. It found that effects of climate change, "once considered an issue for a distant future," have moved firmly into the present. "Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced.”

The response from House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas)? "This is a political document," he said, "intended to frighten Americans into believing that any abnormal weather we experience is the direct result of human CO2 emissions."

The only Republicans on the committee who are not public skeptics or deniers of the science of climate change are Reps. Steve Palazzo of Mississippi and Chris Collins of New York. Yet both are forceful advocates for drilling and fracking, and both have voted repeatedly to block EPA greenhouse pollution rules. Both declined repeated requests for comment.

Following are the 20 climate-hostile House Science Committee Republicans, in their own words.

Lamar Smith of Texas, Committee Chairman

“We now know that prominent scientists were so determined to advance the idea of human-made global warming that they worked together to hide contradictory temperature data. But for two weeks, none of the networks gave the scandal any coverage on their evening news programs. And when they finally did cover it, their reporting was largely slanted in favor of global warming alarmists.”

— December 8, 2009, House floor speech on “Climategate”

Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma

“Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles. During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D. – long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution – temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity.

Even climate change alarmists admit that the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. and the number of tornado touchdowns have been on a slow decline for over 100 years. But here’s what we absolutely know. We know that Oklahoma will have tornadoes when the cold jet stream meets the warm gulf air. And we also know that this President spends 30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.

For this gross misallocation, the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept the President’s apology, and I intend to submit legislation to fix this.”

— June 11, 2013, House floor speech on Oklahoma tornadoes

Mo Brooks of Alabama

“I am unconvinced about America’s ability to do anything about Global Warming (assuming Global Warming is man-made and not a recurrent global weather pattern).”

— September 4, 2010, at Left In Alabama, a politics blog

Paul Broun of Georgia, Oversight Subcommittee Chair

“Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human-induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus.”

— June 26, 2009, House floor speech opposing climate legislation

Larry Bucshon of Indiana, Research and Technology Subcommittee Chair

“The data does not support the premise that carbon dioxide emissions are playing a significant role in the world temperature variations. The temperature of the Earth has been changing over centuries with warmer and colder periods throughout history.”

— June 5, 2010, campaign platform opposing climate legislation

Kevin Cramer of North Dakota

“These mandates and these wind farms are all based on this fraudulent science from the EPA, meaning their claim that CO2 is a pollutant and is causing global warming. I’m sure you’re familiar with one of the leading climate research centers in the world there at East Anglia University in England, the Hadley Research Centre. The director, Phil Jones, his emails, he admitted that he was falsifying temperature data. The reason he had to do this is because the data was showing the global climate is actually declining in temperature, temperatures were going down. He was overlaying higher temperatures on the real data to show that it was actually rising. We know the globe is cooling. Number one, we know that. So the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”

— February 4, 2012, KNOX radio campaign interview

Ralph Hall of Texas, Previous Committee Chairman

“There is growing concern and evidence that scientific data, from which global warming theories emerged, has been manipulated, enhanced or deleted. The IPCC data was used by the EPA as part of the data that went into their endangerment finding. This is especially problematic since the endangerment finding will most likely be used as the basis for a regulatory regime in the U.S.”

— November 11, 2010, House Science Committee hearing on climate science

Randy Hultgren of Illinois

“The greatest impact on our climate clearly is the sun, and we have very little impact on the sun and how much energy and temperature the sun is sending to the earth. We have seen clearly over thousands of years that at different times more energy has come through and different times less energy has come through, and that variation has impacted climate change. Over the thousands of years that’s been recorded we’ve had both colder times and warmer times. It happens to be that we’ve recently come out of a warmer time and now actually we’re headed in to a little bit of a colder time.”

— November 23, 2009, Illinois Review interview

Bill Johnson of Ohio

“Long before Americans were around to blame, there was climate change. Geology tells us that at one time, much of Ohio was covered by ice. At other times, the planet was so warm, that Ohio was under water. These are facts proven throughout the Earth’s history, recorded for the ages in the ground that we live on. Our climate is constantly changing.”

— July 2, 2013, Barnesville Enterprise op-ed by Johnson opposing President Obama’s climate policy

Frank Lucas of Oklahoma

“Most telling of the EPA’s irrational regulatory approach is how the EPA has concluded that the breath that we exhale, the gas that livestock expels, are dangerous pollutants and should be regulated by the Clean Air Act.”

— April 7, 2011, House floor speech opposing EPA greenhouse pollution rules

Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Energy Subcommittee Chair

“There is no disputing that our planet experiences climate change – it has been cycling between cooling and warming periods long before we were here to experience the effects. I believe the jury is still out on whether mankind can alter global climate trends.”

— June 4, 2009, op-ed opposing climate legislation

Thomas Massie of Kentucky

“I would challenge [President Obama] to show us the linkage – the undeniable linkage – between droughts and the change of weather, and some kind of human activity.”

— January 22, 2013, Heritage Foundation “Conversations With Conservatives”

Michael McCaul of Texas

“Whereas recent events have uncovered extensive evidence from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England (in this resolution referred to as the ‘CRU’) which involved many researchers across the globe discussing the destruction, altering, and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims.”

— December 8, 2009, House Resolution 954, regarding the scientific protocols used in climate change research

Randy Neugebauer of Texas

“What we have here is a case of formulating scientific findings that back up policy, instead of creating policy that is backed up by legitimate science. Proponents of man-made global warming in Congress will use every opportunity they have to invite witnesses to testify before Congress who only share their point of view. We now have clear evidence of what we knew all along, that there are perhaps thousands of scientists who don’t share these views, and sadly have been the subject of concerted efforts to discourage and suppress their findings from publication.”

— November 30, 2009, Randy’s Roundup weekly constituent newsletter

Bill Posey of Florida

“If we've had at least three ice ages, and some people, some scientists say five, you cannot have five seamless ice ages. You must warm up between, you know, to have them. The earth has had tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate shifts, meteor strikes, asteroid strikes, for millions of years, and it's not going to stop just because we're here now. When you think back twenty years ago, the worry was global freezing. We're going to freeze again. We're going to have another ice age.”

— December 19, 2011, interview with Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson

Dana Rohrabacher of California

“Too often, when Congress is asked to pass environmental legislation, the legislation is based on emotional junk science rather than data based on reproducible, rigorous, tested, peer-reviewed results. In no area has this been more obvious than climate change. Because the Kyoto Treaty and much of the suggested environmental legislation would decimate jobs in southern California, constituents may be interested to learn of the growing scientific consensus that global warming is not manmade, if it is in fact even occurring.”

— March 18, 2009, House floor speech on global warming

David Schweikert of Arizona, Environment Subcommittee Chair

“When you think about the complexity of a worldwide system and the amount of data you’d have to capture, and how you adjust for a sunspot, and how you adjust for a hurricane and I think it’s incredibly arrogant for the Al Gores of the world to stand up and say the world is coming to an end.”

— June 16, 2010, interview with conservative activist Marcus Kelley

Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin

“For months, legitimate questions have been raised about global warming data not being verified and conflicting data being suppressed, better known to some as ‘Climategate.’”

— February 12, 2010, weekly column

Steve Stockman of Texas

"Global cooling" (70s) -> "Greenhouse effect" (80s) -> "Global warming" (90s) -> "Climate change" (00s) -> Record cold temps (10s)

— January 25, 2014, Stockman's Twitter feed

Randy Weber of Texas

“I may want to get your cell phone, because if we go through cycles of global warming and then back to global cooling, I need to know when to buy my long coat on sale. I just don't know how y'all prove those hypotheses going back fifty, hundred, what you might say is thousands if not millions of years, and then postulate those forward.”

— March 26, 2014, Science Committee hearing with White House science advisor John Holdren

This story was supported by The American Independent Institute.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/26/house-science-committee-c_n_5533992.html

hmmn maybe ok? cf trms 3 states outlaw agw

...

It is sponsored by Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma, who said the recent devastation of extreme weather in his state — including the tragicMoore tornadoes and a crippling drought — prompted him to push for better forecasting tools.

Recent severe events such asHurricane Sandy havehighlighted deficiencies in the current top U.S. weather model, known as the Global Forecast System, but many in the weather and climate community argue that narrowing the agency’s focus would be counter-productive because climate science research and weather modeling work hand-in-hand to understand what the weather might have in store for us at various time scales.

NOAA has objected to the bill because it draws rigid lines between those two priorities and also leaves out other key areas entirely, such as social science research about effectively communicating severe weather warnings.

The bill, known as the “[Weather Forecasting Improvement Act](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:2:./temp/bdXrKp:@@@C|/home/LegislativeData.php|),” was the subject of two hearings in the House Science Subcommittee on the Environment, which approved the bill by voice vote on July 9.

At the July 9 markup, Democrats raised objections to the speed with which the bill was progressing, saying there has not been enough time to get input from the weather and climate community.

Experts testified at two previous hearings that advances in weather forecasting typically benefit the accuracy of climate forecasts, and vice versa.

The bill that emerged from the subcommittee markup contains a provision that would require the NOAA administrator to make “weather-related activities” the top priority for planning in all NOAA “line offices,” including the Office of Atmospheric and Oceanic Research, which funds a large portfolio of the agency’s research programs.

Kathryn Sullivan, the acting NOAA director, said drawing a fine line between weather and climate forecasting would be shortsighted.

“The underlying intent of the bill, of course, is one that we embrace," Sullivan said at a press conference at an Arctic climate conference in Washington on Wednesday. But, she said, "There are a number of provisions as currently drafted in it that we find too narrow and not consistent with how the weather enterprise works.”

According to NOAA’s definition, weather forecasts extend to two weeks in advance, while climate forecasts cover time spans beyond two weeks. Such climate forecasts include everything from seasonal drought outlooks, which are relied upon by water managers, wildfire firefighting agencies, and farmers in particular, to long-range climate change projections that provide insight into how the planet is likely to respond to increasing amounts of manmade greenhouse gases.

The House bill places an emphasis on short-term weather forecasting compared to climate. Bridenstine press secretary Sheryl Kaufman told Climate Central that the bill would prompt “A shift in priority so that there is a higher priority on weather forecasting” within NOAA, when compared to climate research. ...

broun lies from pit of hell plus

"This is a person who is actively involved in shaping science policy in America," Maddow said. She pointed out that Rep. Todd Akin also serves as a Republican member of the House Committee on Science. Akin caused a firestorm for saying that in cases of "legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down."

Representative Dana Rohrabacher is also on the committee. According to Maddow, Rohrabacher once suggested that temperature fluctuations on earth million's of years ago were due to dinosaurs flatulence.

Josh Fox Gasland

==

wapo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/gasland-director-josh-fox-arrested-at-house-hearing/2012/02/01/gIQA2fKmiQ_blog.html

A year ago, Josh Foxwas getting suited up for the Academy Awards. On Wednesday, he found himself in cuffs.

The Oscar-nominated activist-director of the documentary “Gasland” was arrested on Capitol Hill for trying to film a hearing without proper media credentials. Staffers say Fox declined an order by House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee chairman Rep. Andy Harris(R-Md.) to turn off his camera.

“This was an act of civil disobedience, yes, done in an impromptu fashion,” said Fox in an emailed statement later. “When I was led out of the hearing room in handcuffs, John Boehner’s pledge of transparency in Congress was taken out with me.”

Fox’s “Gasland” chronicled the environmental impact of natural gas drilling — he’s opposed to it — on small communities. The same topic was at hand in Wednesday’s hearing.

Committee Republicans issued a statement to AP saying that Fox had failed to get credentials from the House Radio and TV Gallery — but some Democrats said they didn’t have a problem with him being there. Rep. Brad Miller(D-N.C.) told our colleague Aaron Leitko he motioned to allow Fox to keep filming, “provided there was space and that it was not disruptive,” but the measure was defeated. Harris’s office did not get back to us for comment.

The subcommittee’s proceedings are viewable on the Web, but Miller — who said he hasn’t seen “Gasland” — understood why a filmmaker might want his footage. “There’s more latitude to show who you want to show.”

Charged with unlawful entry, Fox has a hearing scheduled for Feb. 15.

Read also: Gasland: One man’s journey into a natural gas crisis, 6/21/10; Mark Ruffalo promotes “Gasland” documentary, 2/19/11

==

reuters

'GasLand' Director Josh Fox Released After D.C. Arrest; Feb. 15 Court Date Set

Wed, Feb 1 2012

"GasLand" director Josh Fox has been processed and released following his arrest at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Fox, who was charged with unlawful entry for trying to film a House Science Committee meeting on hydraulic fracturing -- aka "fracking" -- is due in court on the matter Feb. 15.

Also read: "GasLand" Director Josh Fox Arrested During House Hearing

But just because Fox is a free man again, doesn't mean he's placated. Fox issued a scathing statement from Washington, D.C., on Wednesday following his release.

"I was arrested today for exercising my First Amendment rights to freedom of the press on Capitol Hill," Fox said in the statement. "I was not expecting to be arrested for practicing journalism."

Fox, who's currently working on his sequel to the HBO documentary, characterized his refusal to stop filming the hearing as "an act of civil disobedience" and claimed the Constitutional high ground over the legislators that had shut him out.

"It is my understanding that public speech is allowed to be filmed. Congress should be no exception," Fox asserted. "No one on Capitol Hill should regard themselves exempt from the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution states explicitly 'Congress shall make no law...that infringes on the Freedom of the Press.' Which means that no subcommittee rule or regulation should prohibit a respectful journalist or citizen from recording a public hearing."

Fox and an ABC news crew had attempted to film a hearing to explore the Environmental Protection Agency's investigation into whether the gas and oil-extraction process of hydraulic processing had contaminated the water supply in Pavillion, Wyoming. Fox's 2010, Oscar-nominated documentary "GasLand" covered the topic extensively, as will its sequel.

During Wednesday's incident, Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) pleaded to allow Fox and ABC to film the hearing. However, according to Politico, Republicans on the committee tabled Miller's motion.

Toward that end, Fox took a swipe at Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner in his statement.

"When I was led out of the hearing room in handcuffs, John Boehner's pledge of transparency in congress was taken out with me," Fox said.

Asserting that hydraulic fragmenting is an environmentally damaging practice, Fox predicted that lawmakers' efforts to keep the hearing under wraps would ultimately prove futile.

"The truth that fracking contaminates groundwater is out, and no amount of intimidation tactics -- either outright challenges to science or the arrest of journalists --will put the genie back in the bottle," Fox said. "Such a brazen attempt to discredit and silence the EPA, the citizens of Pavillion and documentary filmmaking will ultimately fail and it is an affront to the health and integrity of Americans."

Related Articles:  'GasLand' Director Josh Fox Arrested During House Hearing Michael Moore Gets Giddy Over Occupy Wall Street: 'Finally!' (Exclusive)

democ

Thursday, February 2, 2012

"Gasland" Director Josh Fox Arrested at Congressional Hearing on Natural Gas Fracking

The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox was handcuffed and arrested Wednesday as he attempted to film a congressional hearing on the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as fracking, which the Environmental Protection Agency recently reported caused water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming. Fox directed the award-winning film, "Gasland," which documents the impact of fracking on communities across the United States, and is now working on a sequel. Fox says he was arrested after Republicans refused to allow him to film because he did not have the proper credentials. "We wanted to report on what happened [at the hearing]. I was not interested in disrupting that hearing. It was not a protest action," says Fox. "I was simply trying to do my job as a journalist and go in there and show to the American people what was transpiring in that hearing, so that down the line, as we know there will be a lot of challenges mounted to that [Pavillion, Wyoming] EPA report—and frankly, to the people in Pavillion, who have been sticking up for themselves and demanding an investigation into the groundwater contamination—and to make sure that people could view that in a larger forum than usually happens." [includes rush transcript]

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox was handcuffed and arrested Wednesday as he attempted to film a congressional hearing on the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as fracking. Fox directed the award-winning documentary Gasland and is now working on a follow-up. Fox says he was arrested after Republicans refused to allow him to film because he did not have the proper credentials.

Video was posted online showing Fox being escorted out of the hearing room in handcuffs. This is what the room sounded like at that moment. You can hear lawmakers debate the arrest and Josh Fox exclaiming, quote, "I’m within my First Amendment rights, and I’m being taken out." Listen closely.

CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER 1: Do you want to leave your camera, sir? You’re under the same rules as the regular staff.

JOSH FOX: I have said it several times, no.

CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER 1: OK. Do your duty, Officer.

CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER 2: All right. Sir, turn around and put your hands behind your back.

UNIDENTIFIED: Oh, come on. Come on. Come on, Mr. Chairman.

UNIDENTIFIED: What’s the decision? You’re arresting him?

REP. BRAD MILLER: Mr. Chairman, can we discuss this before the Capitol police take action at your direction without debate in front of the committee, or the subcommittee?

JOSH FOX: This is a public hearing. I’m within my First Amendment rights, and I’m being taken out.

REP. BRAD MILLER: No, I’d rather do it here.

REP. ANDY HARRIS: The meeting is not—I haven’t [inaudible] the meeting.

REP. BRAD MILLER: Well, but before the meeting has begun and before the subcommittee has had a chance to discuss the issue, this guy is being led away in handcuffs. I’d like to move that he be allowed to film the—film this meeting.

REP. ANDY HARRIS: The motion [inaudible]. We’re not in the hearing.

REP. BRAD MILLER: Well, then, can you gavel the hearing in, before this guy is—

REP. ANDY HARRIS: That’s at my discretion.

AMY GOODMAN: Moments after director [Josh] Fox was arrested inside the hearing in the House Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology, the subcommittee’s chair, Republican Congress Member Andy Harris of Maryland, defended the decision to have the filmmaker removed.

REP. ANDY HARRIS: Nine, the following shall apply to coverage of committee meetings or hearings by audio-visual means. Subsection J is very clear. Personnel providing coverage by the television and radio media shall be currently accredited to the radio and television correspondents’ galleries, and that personnel providing coverage by still photography shall be currently accredited to the press photographers’ galleries. Obviously, someone who records this hearing—records this hearing is to be credentialed. I will remind the members of the audience and the ranking member that on the House floor, you can’t even bring a cell phone into the gallery. So we’re allow—we allow cell phones here, but we do draw the line at what recording devices, when you use a recording device, that you have to be credentialed.

AMY GOODMAN: Democrats on the committee attempted to postpone the hearing a week in order to give Josh Fox time to acquire the proper credentials. Congress Member Brad Miller of North Carolina is the top Democrat on the subcommittee.

REP. BRAD MILLER: Mr. Chairman, I move, in addition to the fellow who was just escorted out, who I understand was not credentialed, although he’s, I understand, filming an HBO documentary—an ABC crew showed up earlier, and they were turned away on the stated reason that they had not requested to film in advance. I think all those rules are to control access where there’s limited access. It is very clear that we have space in this room for either of them to testify—or to film this hearing. If you claim that that rule does not provide—does not allow them to film or, more accurately, allows you the discretion, the majority, the power to turn them away, I move that the rules be suspended to the end that the HBO—the fellow who wanted to film for HBO be allowed to film this hearing and that ABC News be allowed to film this hearing, and all God’s children be allowed to fill this hearing, until the room is too full to conduct our business.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Wednesday’s hearing focused on a recent Environmental Protection Agency draft report that linked contaminated water supplies in Wyoming to chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. While a lobbyist from the Western Energy Alliance testified at Wednesday’s hearing, no local residents impacted by the water contamination were invited to speak.

AMY GOODMAN: Joining us now from Washington, D.C., is filmmaker Josh Fox. With us also via Democracy Now! video stream is John Fenton, who is a Wyoming farmer and chair of the Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens.

Josh, it’s good to have you out of jail. Explain exactly why you were in that hearing yesterday and what happened, as we listen to the debate between the Democrats and the Republicans as you were being handcuffed by police and taken out of the room.

JOSH FOX: Good morning, Amy and Juan. And certainly, hi to John Fenton. Nice to see you.

Well, basically, I was there to report on a story that I’ve been following very closely for three-and-a-half years. John and his fellow people from Pavillion, I’ve been documenting their cases of water contamination for three years, and it’s featured in the first film, Gasland. We continue to feature that in Gasland 2. So, this was a crucial hearing for us to tape, because what was going on there was a clear and brazen attack on the EPA and on the meticulous three-and-a-half-year investigation that took place in the small town of Pavillion, Wyoming, to expose a link between fracking and groundwater contamination. And this is the first case in which EPA has come out and said, at least in this last 10 years, that the likely cause of groundwater contamination was fracking.

And what was apparent to us was that this was going to be an attack on science from within the science and technology committee, that they had a panel that was stuffed with gas industry lobbyists, that there was—this was actually a way of trying to dismantle this EPA report. We wanted to be there to show that that was what the agenda was. We wanted to report on what happened. I was not interested in disrupting that hearing. It was not a protest action. I was simply trying to do my job as a journalist and go in there and show to the American people what was transpiring in that hearing, so that down the line, as we know there will be a lot of challenges mounted to that EPA report—and frankly, to the people in Pavillion, who have been sticking up for themselves and demanding an investigation into the groundwater contamination—and to make sure that people could view that in a larger forum than usually happens.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Josh, the attacks have come not only through this congressional investigation on the EPA report, but also from local press in Wyoming, as well? Obviously, there are huge implications nationwide for what the results of this study show.

JOSH FOX: Well, virtually every Republican candidate right now is out for elimination of the EPA, which shows the deep, deep influence of oil and gas on Congress and on the Republican Party. So, what you’re seeing here happening is a war between the federal agency, which is well funded and impartial, in a certain sense, or more impartial, and the state regulatory agencies, which, as we’ve investigated, and we will show quite thoroughly, I think, in Gasland 2, have an enormous amount of influence and pressure on them from oil and gas, to the point to which many, many people think that they’re corrupt. So getting the EPA out of the way is one of these ways that you completely dismantle the regulatory system, and that’s why the EPA is the target here.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Obama’s recent comments about natural gas drilling. This is what he said just last week in his State of the Union address.

United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

The Committee on Science, Space and Technology is a committee of the United States House of Representatives. It has jurisdiction over non-defense federal scientific research and development. Specifically, the committee has partial or complete jurisdiction over the following federal agencies: NASA, the Department of Energy, EPA, ATSDR, NSF, FAA, NOAA, National Institute of Standards and Technology, FEMA, the U.S. Fire Administration, and United States Geological Survey.

Contents

History

In the wake of the Soviet Sputnik program in the late 1950s, Congress created the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration in 1958. This select committee drafted the National Aeronautics and Space Act that created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). A staff report of the committee, the Space Handbook: Astronautics and its Applications, provided non-technical information about spaceflight to U.S. policy makers.[1]

The committee also chartered the permanent House Committee on Science and Astronautics, which officially began on January 3, 1959, and was the first new standing committee established in the House since 1946. The name was changed in 1974 to the House Committee on Science and Technology. The name was changed again in 1987 to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. After the Republican Party gained a majority in Congress in 1994, the name of the committee was changed to the House Committee on Science. With the return of control to the Democrats in 2007, the committee's name was changed back to the House Committee on Science and Technology.

In the 112th Congress, Committee Chairman Ralph Hall added “Space” back into the Committee’s name: “The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology” – a nod to the Committee’s history, broad jurisdiction, and the importance of space exploration in maintaining American innovation and competitiveness.[2]

Members

113th Congress

The Committee is chaired by Lamar S. Smith of Texas, and the Ranking Member is Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas.

MajorityMinority

New Republicans for the 113th:

New Democrat(s) for the 113th:

Sources: H.Res. 6 (Chairs), H.Res. 7 (D), H.Res. 17 (R) and H.Res. 22 (D).

112th Congress

The Committee was chaired by Ralph Hall of Texas, and the Ranking Member was Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas.

MajorityMinority

Source:

111th Congress

In the 111th United States Congress (January 2009-January 2011), the Committee was chaired by Democrat Bart Gordon of Tennessee,[4] and the Ranking Member was Republican Ralph Hall of Texas.[5]

MajorityMinority

Sources:

Subcommittees

There are six subcommittees in the 113th Congress.[6]

SubcommitteeChairRanking Member
EnergyCynthia Lummis (R-WY)Eric Swalwell (D-CA)
EnvironmentAndy Harris (R-MD)Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR)
OversightPaul Broun (R-GA)Dan Maffei (D-NY)
ResearchLarry Bucshon (R-IN)Dan Lipinski (D-IL)
SpaceSteven Palazzo (R-MS)Donna Edwards (D-MD)
TechnologyThomas Massie (R-KY)Frederica Wilson (D-FL)

Committee chairmen, 1959-present

Chairmen since 1959.[7]

References

Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (July 2010)
  1. ^ "Space Handbook: Astronautics and its Applications". NASA.
  2. ^ "A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY" (PDF). United States Government. November 7, 2007.
  3. ^ H.Res. 822, November 29, 2012
  4. ^ H.Res. 8
  5. ^ H.Res. 12
  6. ^ "Subcommittees". United States Government. 2008.
  7. ^ Ibid.

See also

External links

dupl of comm on sci

Attachments