SMITH, Lamar REP

see LS 2

7/18 tag not implemented lamr

def of prvt prop bond villains, wise use

attack sci, exxonknew, RICO L JOLLA SUMMIT

have i never written up prose on this guy? 720

capt 616

not climate

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/people/lamar-smith

tag

http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/13621

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_S._Smith

Lamar Seeligson Smith (born November 19, 1947) is theU.S. Representative (Republican) for Texas's 21st congressional district, serving since 1987. The district includes most of the wealthier sections of San Antonio and Austin, as well as some of the Texas Hill Country. He sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act (PCIP). He also co-sponsored the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.^[1]

...

Climate change

As of 2015, Smith has received more than $600,000 from the fossil fuel industry during his career in Congress.^[45] In 2014, Smith got more money from fossil fuels than he did from any other industry.^[46]Smith is publicly skeptic of global warming.^[47][48][49] Under his leadership, the House Science committee has held hearings that feature the views of skeptics,^[50] subpoenaed the records and communications of scientists who published papers that Smith disapproved of,^[47] and attempted to cut NASA's earth sciences budget.^[51] He has been criticized for conducting "witch hunts" against climate scientists.^[46] In his capacity as Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Smith issued more subpoenas in his first three years than the committee had for its entire 54-year history.^[46]

Committee assignments

Smith currently serves as chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology for the 113th Congress, having replaced Ralph Hall.^[52] Smith has previously served on the Committee on Homeland Security, Committee on the Judiciary (Chairman), the Republican Study Committee, and the Tea Party Caucus.

On January 30, 2015, Law360 reported that Smith has sent letters to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and to the chief technology officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, asking for an explanation of media claims of HealthCare.gov sharing private data supplied by subscribers with third-parties such as Google, Twitter, and.../ YouTube.^[53]

...

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.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/22112015/ranking-congresswoman-defends-NOAA-climate-change-scientists-from-witch-hunt-lamar-smith

Congresswoman Defends NOAA Scientists From Lamar Smith 'Witch Hunt'

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson sends Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee, a blistering critique of his 'ideological crusade.'

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

NOV 23, 2015

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnsondelivered a blistering critique of a Republican campaign to discredit the work of federal climate scientists, branding the effort "hyper-aggressive oversight," a "fishing expedition" and an "ideological crusade."

The months-long probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers is being led by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chair of the House science committee. Johnson is the committee's ranking democrat.

"In six separate, and increasingly aggressive, letters," Johnson wrote in a Nov. 19 letter to Smith, "the only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science—i.e., doing their jobs." The letter charges Smith of "political posturing intended to influence public opinion" ahead of the Paris climate talks.

Smith responded to Johnsonon Monday, calling her "characterization of the Committee’s efforts to obtain data from a government agency under its jurisdiction… inaccurate and misleading."

The congressman is targeting a June 4 study by federal researchers that refutes the so-called "hiatus" in global warming. The hiatus theory—favored by climate denialists—argues warming has paused or slowed since 1998. The study was led by Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, and published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

Since July, Smith has sent NOAA letters and subpoenas asking the agency to provide "all documents and communications" related to the study. NOAA has refused to comply with Smith's requests for emails, citing the importance of confidentiality among scientists.

"The whole thing is really disconcerting...somebody doesn't like the result you publish and all of a sudden you have this huge hammer of a congressional subpoena hanging over your head.It has a chilling effect on scientists," said Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In her letter, Johnson, also from Texas, criticized Smith for not explaining why he was investigating NOAA, as well as for making "sweeping indictments" to media that federal scientists manipulated data to advance President Obama's climate change agenda.

"In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing," Johnson wrote. "You have accused NOAA's top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation's most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on). If that weren't enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to [NOAA] Administrator [Kathryn] Sullivan herself.

"And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations—exposing this so-called 'investigation' for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain."

Johnson first contacted Smith with her concerns about the investigation in October. When Smith didn't respond, she decided she needed to write him again, said Kristin Kopshever, a House science committee spokeswoman for Johnson.[costello staff]

"Over the past couple of years, the committee has had a lot of investigations," said Kopshever. It has investigated the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation,she said. In September, Smith launched an investigation of Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University in Virginia who called for a federal probe into whether fossil fuel companies knowingly misled the public on climate change.

What made her word these recent letters [to Smith] so strongly, Kopshever said, "is that he doesn't have any fact-based allegations against NOAA for wrongdoing or misuse of power or funds that would typically prompt an investigation."

Smith also wrote two letters to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker urging her to pressure NOAA to cooperate with the House committee probe. The most recent one was sent on Nov. 18. In it, Smith claimed to have whistleblower communications that show "wrongdoing."

"Information provided to the Committee by whistleblowers appears to show that the Karl study was rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of NOAA scientists," Smith wrote. Pritzker was out of the country last week and askedSullivan of NOAA to respond on her behalf. "Let me assure you that I am not engaged in or associated with any 'politically correct agenda,'" Sullivan wrote in the Nov. 20 letter. "I have not and will not allow anyone to manipulate the science or coerce the scientists who work for me."

Johnson requested that the whistleblower information be shared with Democratic members of the science committee. She called Smith's criticism that the study was "rushed" a "mild accusation"—one not serious enough to warrant a congressional investigation.

"The Constitution doesn't provide you with a blank check to harass research scientists with whose results you disagree," she wrote.

In his response letter Monday, Smith said that asking for the source's information "in a public setting is not only harmful to the Committee’s current investigations, but may have a chilling effect on the willingness of federal employees to report waste, fraud, and abuse to the Committee in the future."

Read the full letter:

Michael E. Mann

State College, Pa. — WITH world leaders gathered in Paris to address climate change, most of the planet seems to have awakened to the reality that the Earth is warming and that we’re responsible.

But not Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He has long disputed the overwhelming scientific evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are changing the climate. Now he is using his committee chairmanship to go after the government’s own climate scientists, whose latest study is an inconvenience to his views.

In October, Mr. Smith issued a subpoena to Kathryn D. Sullivan, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, demanding all internal notes, emails and correspondence concerning a study its scientists published in the journal Science. The study found that the “rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than what was seen during the latter half of the 20th century.”

This conclusion disputed the claim, seized upon by climate-change deniers like Mr. Smith, that there has been a slowdown in the rate of global warming in recent years. In fact, 2014 was the warmest year on record, and this year is likely to end up even warmer.

Fortunately, NOAA did not acquiesce to Mr. Smith’s outrageous demands. The agency pointed out that it had provided Mr. Smith’s committee with the scientific briefings, data and studies behind the Science article, as well as two thorough briefings by NOAA scientists. But Mr. Smith was not satisfied. He repeated his demand for all subpoenaed documents and warned of “civil and/or criminal enforcement mechanisms” if the agency did not comply.

Certainly, as the chairman of a congressional committee, Mr. Smith is entitled to all of the data behind the study so he can fulfill his oversight role in determining, as he put it in one letter to the agency, “the quality of the analysis and decision-making.”

At the same time, as NOAA noted, the confidentiality of communications between scientists is “essential to frank discourse.” For that reason, the agency rejected his demand.

As the American Meteorological Society pointed out in a letter to Mr. Smith,“implicitly questioning the integrity of the researchers conducting those studies can be viewed as a form of intimidation that could deter scientists from freely carrying out research on important national challenges.”

Eight leading scientific organizations echoed that concern late last month. Since then, Mr. Smith has agreed to prioritize his demands, seeking first to obtain communications from all of NOAA’s “political, policy and nonscientific staff.” But he added, ominously, that “this prioritization does not alleviate NOAA’s obligation to respond fully to the Committee’s subpoena.”

This is not Mr. Smith’s first attempt to stifle science when it conflicts with his ideology. During his tenure as the committee’s chairman, he has attempted to slash funding for earth sciences research by the National Science Foundation. He has threatened to replace the foundation’s vaunted scientific peer-review process with a system where congressmen like him help choose which scientific grants are funded.

And he recently started a congressional investigation into the finances of an environmental institute headed by a climate scientist [JS] who was a lead signatory of a letter suggesting that if fossil fuel companies knowingly misrepresented what they knew about climate change, they should be held accountable in the same way the tobacco industry was for hiding its knowledge about the health impacts of tobacco.

Unfortunately, this sort of harassment of climate scientists is nothing new, and Mr. Smith is not its only practitioner. In 2005, Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sought all of my personal emails and notes because I had published a study with colleagues showing how the planet’s temperature had shot up after 1900.

Not only did Democrats object. So did Republicans.

Sherwood Boehlert, then a Republican congressman from New York and the chairman of the very committee that Mr. Smith now runs, expressed his “strenuous objections” to Mr. Barton’s “misguided and illegitimate investigation.” Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, also weighed in against what he saw as “a kind of intimidation which threatens the relationship between science and public policy” that “must not be tolerated.”

We’ve certainly regressed since then. Mr. Smith’s efforts at intimidation have met with no resistance from his fellow Republicans.

While there is no doubt climate change is real and caused by humans, there is absolutely a debate to be had about the details of climate policy, and there are prominent Republicans participating constructively in that discourse. Let’s hear more from these sensible voices. And let’s end the McCarthy-like assault on science led by the Lamar Smiths of the world. Our nation is better than that.

Michael E. Mann directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and is the author of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines.

d roberts vox

The thing is: The Benghazi committee is not even the worst committee in the House. I'd argue that the House science committee, under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith (R-TX), deserves that superlative for its open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions.

The science committee's modus operandi is similar to the Benghazi committee's — sweeping, catchall investigations, with no specific allegations of wrongdoing or clear rationale, searching through private documents for out-of-context bits and pieces to leak to the press, hoping to gain short-term political advantage — but it stands to do more lasting long-term damage.

In both cases, the investigations have continued long after all questions have been answered. (There were half a dozen probes into Benghazi before this one.) In both cases, the chair has drifted from inquiry to inquisition. But with Benghazi, the only threat is to the reputation of Hillary Clinton, who has the resources to defend herself. With the science committee, it is working scientists being intimidated, who often do not have the resources to defend themselves, and the threat is to the integrity of the scientific process in the US. It won't take much for scientists to get the message that research into politically contested topics is more hassle than it's worth.

This year, Smith was one of the committee chairs granted sweeping new subpoena powers by his fellow House Republicans, what one staffer called "exporting the Issa model." No longer is the chair required to consult with the ranking member before launching investigations or issuing subpoenas. A spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said, "This change will inevitably [lead] to widespread abuses of power as Republicans infect the other committees with the poisonous process that Issa has so abused during his chairmanship."

That turned out to be pretty prescient, at least in the case of the science committee. No chair has taken to his new role with as much enthusiasm as Smith. Here are just three of his recent exploits.

Hassling a scientist for unwelcome results

In June, a scientist named Thomas Karl, along with colleagues, published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Science called "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus." It cast doubt on the global warming "pause" that has become the latest cause célèbre for climate change, er, doubters.

That did not sit well with Smith, who is a doubter himself, like many of the Republicans on his committee and more than half of all House Republicans. And it was the subject of much heated attack in the denial-o-sphere.

So Smith has gone after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where Karl works as the director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). For a play-by-play, I recommend this scorching letter to Smith from committee ranking member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX).

In it, she notes that Smith made three written requests for information about Karl's study, all of which NOAA responded to in writing and in personal briefings. "Moreover," she writes, "NOAA attempted to explain certain aspects of the methodology about which the Majority was apparently confused." (Imagine how that meeting went.)

Among Smith's repeated demands: access to the data and methods behind NOAA's work on climate. Except, as NOAA and Democratic members of the committee kept trying to explain, those data and methods are posted on the internet. Anyone can access them. Yet Republicans kept demanding them.

Unsatisfied with the total cooperation and untrammeled access his committee received, Smith issued a subpoena:

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.

"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.

(Coincidentally, the very following day, longtime climate skeptic blogger Bob Tisdale published a long post calling into question the very adjustments to temperature data that were mentioned in Smith's subpoena.)

To be clear, Smith has not alleged any corruption, wrongdoing, or even bad science. He hasn't alleged anything. Nor has he offered any justification for why he needs access to NOAA internal communications. The new rules mean that he no longer has to explain or justify himself to anyone. He's just hoping to find something he can use.

Here's the most pointed part of Johnson's letter:

The baseless conflict you have created by issuing the October 13 subpoena is representative of a disturbing pattern in your use of Congressional power since your Chairmanship began. In the past two years and ten months that you have presided as Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology you have issued more subpoenas (six) than were issued in the prior 54 year history of the Committee. That prior Committee history is filled with extensive legitimate oversight concerning consequential events — oftentimes quite literally matters of life and death. Yet none of the prior eleven Chairs of our Committee exercised their authority with the degree of partisan brashness as is now the case in our Committee.

Hassling a scientist for unwelcome politics

Recently, political pressure on Exxon and the oil industry has been growing.

In May, Sen. SheldonWhitehouse (D-RI) gave a speech and penned an op-ed on the possibility of a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) case against the energy industry, arguing that the "parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking."

http://web.archive.org/web/20150920110942/http:/www.iges.org/letter/LetterPresidentAG.pdf

{Sincerely,

Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

(continued on page 2)

Letter to President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren

David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO

T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL

Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX

Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, ColumbiaUniversity, New York, NY

Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY

Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY

Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT }

On September 1, a group of about 20 climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and OSTP Director John Holdren recommending that they look into aRICO case.Holdren replied, deferring any legal decisions to the Department of Justice but writing that "the Administration shares the concern expressed in the letter about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change."

On September 21, InsideClimate News published the first in what would become a blockbuster series of stories that made clear just how much Exxon knew about the dangers of climate change, and how soon, well before it spent millions of dollars deliberately obscuring the issue. In early October, the LA Times followed up with its own investigation.

On October 15, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) wrote Lynch asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether the company violated the law. On October 20, Bernie Sanders joined the call for a federal investigation.

None of this sat well with Smith, either. So he's going after one of the scientists who signed the letter to Obama.

Apparently the letter was (inadvertently, the organization says) posted on the website of George Mason University's Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a nonprofit research institution led by one of the scientists who signed the letter, Jagadish Shukla.

Science journalist Warren Cornwall tells what happened next:

The letter eventually came to the attention of outsiders, including science policy specialistRoger Pielke, Jr.,of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Pielke, an active voice in debates over climate science and policy, called attention to the letter on Twitter, and also raised questions about IGES’s finances. Soon, journalists, including several associated with conservative news outlets, were writing about the letter and IGES.The Daily Caller, for example, noted that "climate scientists asking Obama to prosecute skeptics got millions from U.S. taxpayers,"in a 21 September story.

Smith got wind of this and sent Shukla a letter (citing the Daily Caller story) noting that "IGES appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in partisan political activity by requesting a RICO investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the Obama administration on climate change."

Here's what Smith demanded from IGES:

Preserve all e-mail, electronic documents, and data ("electronic records") created since January 1, 2009, that can be reasonably anticipated to be subject to a request for production by the Committee. ...

Exercise reasonable efforts to identify and notify current employees, former employees, contractors, and third party groups who may have access to such electronic records that they are to be preserved ...

Like the other scientists, Shukla signed the letter as a private citizen, not a representative of his organization. Yet "current employees, former employees, contractors, and third party groups" will now be hounded for electronic records back to 2009.

Now the whole mess has come to the attention of bottom feeder Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who spends his time hassling scientists with public records requests. He has now filed them with several universities that employ scientists who signed the letter.

Hassling a prestigious research organization for funding studies with funny names

For more than 60 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has supported basic research in science and engineering. With a $7 billion budget, it is responsible for about 20 percent of the federal government's basic research spending.

The NSF "merit review" process is something of a legend, a multilayered process that sends each grant past a panel of independent scientists, researchers, and educators in the field, with scrupulous rules to avoid conflicts of interest. About 80 percent of applications fail to pass review; receiving an NSF grant is widely seen as a mark of prestige in the science world.

Crucially, the peer review is blind. The names of reviewers are never disclosed.

Republicans on the science committee believe they have discovered an important flaw in the process: Sometimes it awards grants to studies that sound funny.

Smith is convinced that NSF is wasting public money by funding these funny-sounding studies, which has led to a long and acrimonious fight between Republicans on the committee and committee Democrats, NSF's leadership, and much of the academic and research community.

(Said parties have engaged in a long and spirited exchange of correspondence, which you can read in full here.)

Smith is demanding that NSF turn over all the details — including internal communications and the names of reviewers — related to a growing list of grants that he thinks don't sound quite right.It's up to about 50 now, and as journalist Jeffrey Mervis explains, "the scientific community is scratching its head over how Smith compiled his list of questionable grants":

[T]he list is hard to characterize. One grant goes back to 2005, and 13 appear to have expired. The total amount of money awarded is about $26 million. The smallest grant, awarded in 2005, is $19,684 for a doctoral dissertation on "culture, change & chronic stress in lowland Bolivia." The largest, for $5.65 million, is for a project that aims to use innovative education methods to educate Arctic communities about climate change and related issues.

If you do the math, $26 million represents about 0.37 percent of NSF's budget.

Smith demanded that all files related to these grants be sent to his House offices. NSF leadership pushed back, which led to this absurd scene:

Four times this past summer, in a spare room on the top floor of the headquarters of the National Science Foundation (NSF) outside of Washington, D.C., two congressional staffers spent hours poring over material relating to 20 research projects that NSF has funded over the past decade. Each folder contained confidential information that included the initial application, reviewer comments on its merit, correspondence between program officers and principal investigators, and any other information that had helped NSF decide to fund the project.

No one knows what Smith and his staffers are looking for, because they won't say. It's difficult to imagine what staffers think they will learn from rifling through these documents, or why they think the judgments they come to in a few hours will improve upon NSF's peer review process. All they can hope to find is fodder for more press releases.

https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/smith-don-t-reward-nsf-s-frivolous-use-taxpayer-money-more-money

...Chairman Smith has requested information from the NSF on a number of questionable grants. For example NSF awarded $250,000 through its SBE Directorate to fund a study of public attitudes toward the U.S. Senate filibuster. There have been hundreds of privately and publicly funded studies and polls on this topic that have been conducted with far less taxpayer money. Additional questionable SBE grants include:

Oppression and mental health in Nepal          $160,000

Tort law/slavery in colonial Peru                     $50,000

Regulation of China’s dairy industry             $152,000

But the SBE Directorate isn’t the only source of questionable NSF grants. For instance, NSF has handed out $700,000 for “The Great Immensity,” a climate change musical; $5.6 million to Columbia University for a climate change scavenger hunt and phone game; and $4 million for college students to imagine a utopian future in which everyone is forced to give up eating meat and ride bicycles, while the courts re-distribute property to achieve economic equality...

http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-paid-4-9-million-to-create-hypothetical-utopian-climate-change-future/

the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave nearly $5 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s actions on climate change, including a utopian future where everyone rides a bike and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.

The government has awarded $4,911,961 for the project, which is slated to run until March 2016 and for which the school has created a website suggesting different possibilities of what Yahara, a Wisconsin watershed, will be like in 2070.

In the scenario where Americans “shift our values,” people live in hippie-like communes after “youth culture” convinces the world to give up their cars and eat vegetarian.

“By the 2020s, the world seemed at the edge of environmental and political collapse,” the scenario says. “Despite this predicament, youth culture becomes empowered to shift the course of humanity. Disenchanted with the country’s highly consumptive culture, the younger generations embrace community building and sustainability and work together through grassroots action to get their voices heard.”

The youth bring about the “Great Transition” in the 2040s, establishing a “new normal” where “connectivity, community, and environmental sustainability pervade policy and cultural decisions.”

The protagonist of the story is Rosa, a “community organizer” for a United Nations youth group “Badgers for Our Future,” who presides over the only holiday celebrated in the community, Earth Day.[einhorn wacko nbc]

“It has become custom for Rosa, the unofficial community matriarch, to give a blessing before the Earth Day meal (although not everyone in the community is religious, they say secular blessings before important community meals to express gratitude for what the Earth provided them),” the story says.

The community shares economic resources, as well as goods and services, such as “vehicles, appliances, equipment, meals, and expertise.” Material wealth is criticized, and the community lives by the slogan “rich in time; sufficient in things.”

“Material wealth is not the coefficient of life quality,” the story says. “As such, consumers, overall, consume less.”

“What individuals don’t share with their communities is purchased primarily out of need.”

Rosa celebrates a court decision that forcibly took property from wealthy individuals as a required step to place the community above the individual.

“Even though most Yaharans had become more willing to undertake serious conservation measures, the willingness was not universal, especially when certain sacrifices were required,” she tells her granddaughter in the story. “To create the preserve, Grandpa had to convince several wealthy residents to give up either some of their property or their control of it.”

When some individuals refused, a coalition took them to court, which unanimously ruled in favor of building a community beach.

“It was a glorious victory!” Rosa says. “Oh, how we celebrated! It symbolized how far we’d come in putting the good of our communities and our environment before the desires of the individual. The triumph was proof the Great Transition had arrived.”

“I’d say my community embodies the ideals of the Great Transition,” Rosa says in an animated. “Like many communities in Yahara, we’ve joined our backyards together into one communal space. We have a small urban farm, a restored prairie, and a community gathering space.”

Citizens of Yahara are “much less reliant on cars,” the only ones left on the roads being hybrids or electric, and the roads are full of bike lanes to “accommodate the growing masses of bike commuters.”

“Since more people are living the pedestrian life, with their feet more frequently on the pavement or the pedal, the obesity rate is shrinking,” the story says.

People are glad to pay higher taxes in this future because of an “increased sense of responsibility toward one’s community.” Campaign finance reform has also brought “increased transparency and public participation in decision making.”

The American diet is “now primarily plant-based” after “widespread public concern over the climate footprint of livestock banished meat as a dietary centerpiece.”

Policy changes such as a mandatory living wage for farm workers have “caused food prices to rise,” though the public is “largely unfazed,” the story says.

The UN youth movement helped usher in this “new world order,” where population growth has declined, use of fossil fuels has largely been deserted in favor or wind and solar, and a cross-country train system has replaced air fare that has become too expensive.

“In the United States, as family sizes decreased, the conceptual boundaries of ‘family’ expanded to include neighbors and friends,” the story says.

Americans now engage in the “pursuit of sustainable happiness,” by adopting a global Gross National Happiness (GNH) index as “its official gauge of prosperity,” replacing GDP.

The index is based on a system from the country of Bhutan, and takes into account “good governance” and “environmental conservation.”

However, pockets of “traditionalists” still threaten the “winds of great change.” The so-called traditionalists have “been slower to accept or adopt the newer norms, feel society has not necessarily gotten better with the Transition, since certain conveniences and privacies have disappeared.”

A small group of elderly people also “occasionally complain” that the community “constrains individual privacy, but with the widespread embrace of space sharing and walkability, such complaints are considered deviant.”

Rosa acknowledges that the community is “certainly no utopia.” “Although economic equality has improved as a result of these changes, poverty still exists, and many people still rely on entitlement programs,” the story adds.

[

NSF Program(s): CR-Water Sustainability & Clim

Program Reference Code(s): 1181, 1195, 9169, EGCH

Program Element Code(s): 7977

The University of Wisconsin-Madison project is similar to the $5.6 million the NSF awarded to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an earth destroyed due to climate change.

This entry was posted in Issues and tagged Climate Change, Government Waste. Bookmark the permalink.

France Córdova being sworn in as NSF director, with no inkling of what she's in for.

What's clear is that Smith's unilateral use of subpoena power has forced the NSF to compromise the longstanding confidentiality of its review process. It has sent letters to several universities that employ grantees, explaining that it had no choice but to turn over documents. But the damage is already being done. The trust the foundation has built among the scientific community over the past 60 years is in jeopardy.

In another damning letter to her counterpart, Rep. Johnson says:

The plain truth is that there are no credible allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse associated with these 20 awards. The only issue with them appears to be that you, personally, think that the grants sound wasteful based on your understanding of their titles and purpose. Seeking to substitute your judgment for the determinations of NSF's merit review process is the antithesis of the successful principles our nation has relied on to make our research investment decisions. The path you are going down risks becoming a textbook example of political judgment trumping expert judgment.

She goes on to note that on September 16, Fox News carried a story about one of the grants that contained a quote from Smith disparaging it, along with two pieces of information that could only have been gleaned from the confidential materials involved in the grant.

To summarize: The chair of a House committee is using his newly expanded subpoena power to go fishing through the work of the NSF, forcing it to breach its storied confidentiality, searching for bits and pieces of decontextualized information that can be leaked to right-wing media to make the executive branch look bad, on behalf of an ideological quest to cut research funding.

Worse than the Benghazi committee

The science committee, Fox News, the Daily Caller, climate deniers, CEI— at this point, it's all one partisan operation, sharing information and strategies.

Republican radicalization has already laid waste to many of the written and unwritten rules that once governed American politics. The use of congressional committees as tools of partisan intimidation is only a chapter in that grim story. [recall IN 1ST RUN AT BK JUDICAL FUNCT OF CONGRESS WEAPONIZED]

But the science committee is going after individual scientists, who rarely have the resources on hand to defend themselves from unexpected political attack. It is doing so without any rationale related to the constitutional exercise of its oversight powers — not with a false rationale, but without any stated rationale, no allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse — in service of an effort to suppress inconvenient scientific results and score partisan political points against the executive branch.

The federal government is an enormous supporter of scientific research, to the country's great and enduring benefit, though that support is now under sustained attack. If such funding comes with strings, with the threat that the wrong inquiry or results could bring down a congressional inquisition, researchers are likely to shy away from controversial subjects. The effects on the US scientific community, and on America's reputation as a leader in science, could be dire, lingering on well past the 2016 election.

NSF Program(s):	CR-Water Sustainability & Clim

Program Reference Code(s):	1181, 1195, 9169, EGCH

Program Element Code(s):	7977

===

10/15

This week, CSLDF filed a legal brief as amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” urging the Arizona Court of Appeals to protect two University of Arizona climate scientists from massive and harassing open records requests.

As described in our brief, a group is claiming that state open records laws entitle it to virtually unfettered access to public university climate scientists’ emails. These hugely invasive open records requests are a key element of a campaign to harass and intimidate scientists and are part of a broader strategy of attacking individual scientists to try to discredit theories or even entire fields of study. We have urged the Court to protect scientists’ correspondence against such invasions. Please read more about our brief and the case here.

In addition, this month Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) launched an investigation against climate scientist Dr. Jagadish Shukla for engaging in “partisan political activity." Dr. Shukla wrote a letter to President Obama, supporting a Washington Post op-ed that proposed an inquiry of some corporate opponents to climate action. Rep. Smith, who has criticized the very notion of man-made climate change (and who has beenwell-supported by the oil and gas industries), seems to believe Dr. Shukla was thus guilty of “unwelcome politics” worthy of a Congressional investigation. :{CSLDF has been working to help defend Dr. Shukla:(style="font-weight:700"):}:, including arranging attorney assistance to help him navigate what appears to be a clearly ideologically-motived Congressional probe.

===

https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00001811&newMem=N

Climate Scientist Faces Backlash for Urging Investigation of Fossil Fuel Companies

Jagadish Shukla will be questioned by a Congressional committee after he and other scientists called for a racketeering probe of deliberate climate denial.

climate scientist who was thelead signatory on a letter urging President Obama to launch a federal investigation into whether fossil fuel companies "knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change" is now facing an investigation by Congress because of his part in the letter.

Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University in Virginia, received notice Oct. 1 that the non-profit research organization he runs, the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), will soon be investigated by the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology for suspected misuse of federal funding.

Republican Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who chairs the House committee, requested that Shukla and IGES "preserve all e-mail, electronic documents, and data (‘electronic records’) created since January 1, 2009," according to the notice.

The investigation stems from Shukla's involvement in the letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House science advisor John Holdren on Sept. 1. The letter's 20 signees—climate scientists from Columbia University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Maryland and other institutions—asked the administration to explore whether energy companies could be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970 for purposefully casting doubt on the scientific evidence for climate change. Federal prosecutors used the RICO Act in the 1990s and 2000s to sue tobacco companies for covering up the health impacts of smoking. ScienceInsider first reported Smith's investigation.

Shukla's research organization, IGES, posted a copy of the RICO letter to its website—a move that Smith told Shukla "raises serious concerns" over a taxpayer-funded scientific group "participating in partisan political activity." The research center has received funds from the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

"Promoting a lobbying effort and publicizing that effort on a website is not an appropriate use of federal research funds," an aide for the House Science, Space and Technology Committee told InsideClimate News.

"Additional questionshave been raisedregarding the fiscal management of federal grant dollars received by IGES and the transfer of IGES to George Mason University," the aide said. The committee will be looking into the salaries of Shukla and his wife Anastasia, who works as the organization's business manager.

"I signed this letter as a private citizen on personal time, urging action on climate change, and I have been shocked by the reaction," Shukla told InsideClimate News. "Any allegations of inappropriate behavior are untrue."

IGES said the letter was posted on its website inadvertently. It has since been removed.

"IGES's recent decision to remove documents from its website raises concerns that additional information vital to the Committee's investigation may not be preserved," Smith wrote. Smith informed Shukla he and his colleagues had until Oct. 8 to inform the House Committee on how IGES would comply with the request.

"The House Science Committee isn’t going after Dr. Shukla and his colleagues for their scientific work, but for their opinions as private citizens," said Michael Halpern, program manager of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Scientists have the same right as anyone to engage in the political process and express their beliefs without fear of being hauled before Congress for their views."

A History of Inquiries

Smith's investigation is just the latest in a long line of probes into climate scientists by conservative politicians. In 2005, Republican Rep. Joe Bartonof Texas, who was then Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, examined the work of climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State and Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts. Over the last decade, the scientific community has had to field an increasing number of public records requests from conservative groups looking to cast doubt on their research.

"Overall, scientists whose work is policy relevant are certainly under more scrutiny than ever before through a variety of means, from subpoenas to open records requests, and need to be prepared to respond to that scrutiny," said Halpern. Such investigations, he said, "can send the wrong message to researchers about how valuable their expertise is to society. We need scientists to engage in public conversations on science-based issues, no matter how contentious the topic."

The biggest difference between Smith's investigation today and the one Mann and Bradley faced in 2005, Mann said, is that "back then, there were a number of moderate pro-science, pro-environment Republicans who came to my defense. Chief among them was Sherwood Boehlert—an old-school Republican from upstate New York."

"Unfortunately, we no longer have moderate republicans like Boehlert chairing the House science committee," said Mann.

Shukla and his colleagues' letter was sent three weeks before an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News showed that ExxonMobil's own research confirmed fossil fuels' role in climate change in the 1970s and 1980s. The company then spent the next two decades funding a campaign to derail climate regulations and question climate science.

"If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible," Shulka and the other climate scientists wrote in the letter.

Holdren wrote back to the researchers that "the [Obama] administration shares the concern expressed in the letter about the seriousness of the threat posed by climate change," according to ScienceInsider.

ScienceInsider also reported that Shulka is not the only signatory of the letter facing backlash. Attorney Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank, filed a public records request with several of the signatories' universities for emails contained the words "RICO, racketeer, racketeering, DOJ, prosecute or prosecution."

"If they believe this is part of their job, we will not dispute that, but instead would like to see how the institutions were used in this innovative application of public education resources," Horner told ScienceInsider.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/07102015/climate-scientist-shukla-backlash-RICO-investigation-fossil-fuel-companies-lamar-smith-congress

11/14

House Science Chair Says Latest Climate Report Is 'Clearly Biased,' But He Only Read The Summary

Lamar Smith, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, hasn't read the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but he says he knows enough to conclude that “most of the predictions have been wrong," he told Bloomberg TV on Friday.

“Congressman, it’s science. It’s 800 scientists," Bloomberg host Cory Johnson interrupted. "It’s not some random guy making a prediction.”

“There are a lot of other scientists who disagree," said the Texas Republican. "For example, we’ve now had close to 18 years of no global warming even though carbon dioxide emissions have increased 25 percent over the last 18 years. Nobody can explain that."

Smith told Johnson he had not read the IPCC report. “I only read summaries,” he said, and described the report authors as “clearly biased.”

There is near unanimity among active climate scientists that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it. Several studies have also debunked the idea that climate change isn't happening because surface air temperatures have risen more slowly since the 1990s. Rising greenhouse gas emissions mean a stronger greenhouse effect and the Earth continues to absorb more energy than it radiates back into space. This energy imbalance manifests itself in other ways, such as ocean warming and glacial melting.

Globally, 13 of the 14 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century. And there is a good chance that 2014 may set the record as the warmest year since record keeping began in 1880.

"There’s still no explanation and no one can tell me yet what percentage of so-called climate change is due to human activity [and] what percentage is due to natural trends, natural cycles," Smith said. But in its latest report, the IPCC states with 95 percent confidence that it is "extremely likely" that "more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010" was caused by human activities.

Despite this overwhelming evidence from the most respected climate researchers,Rep. Smith says, "We don’t know enough yet to make decisions that are going to hurt our economy or hurt the American people ... Let’s continue to gather the facts, make sure the science is correct."

Smith, however, has worked to undermine climate science in his position as chairman of the committee. He's investigated National Science Foundation grants to researchers working on climate change on the premise that those grants aren't in the "national interest."

Nor does he seem particularly interested in finding out more about climate science. His committee has held more hearings on aliens than they have on climate science in the 113th Congress.

[huffpo

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has a long track record of climate change denial. And under his leadership, the committee has spent more time holding hearings on the existence of extraterrestrial life than it has examining climate science or the repercussions of global climate change.

The House and Senate have held a combined 19 hearings on space exploration during the 113th Congress, according to a report Wednesday in the National Journal. Smith’s committee alone has organized 15 of those hearings, including three that focused on discovering alien life.

Meanwhile, Smith’s committee has held justtwo hearings dedicated to climate change.

Several House committees are responsible for addressing U.S. energy and environmental issues. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has held only one hearing on climate change, while the House Natural Resources Committee has yet to take up the issue in the 113th Congress.

Numerous sitting members of the House Science Committee have expressed views rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Committee member James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) has gone so far as to call climate change a “massive international scientific fraud” and evidence of “scientific fascism,” while Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a young Earth creationist, believes the Earth was “created in six days as we know them.”

“You could argue that it makes sense for the House Science Committee to rigorously discuss outer space — after all, it’s right there in the committee’s name,”wrote The National Journal’s Emma Roller, who tallied up the hearing topics. “But you could also argue that when the committee you chair has the word ‘science’ in its name, you may want to discuss the premier scientific debate that’s going on.”

Sometimes, however, the environment comes up in the context of extraterrestrial life. At the House Science Committee’s latest hearing on aliens, held on Wednesday, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Director Dan Werthimer noted that while the possibility of extraterrestrial microbial life is nearly certain, “If we discover that we are alone, we’d better take really good care of life on this planet.”

While much of the congressional climate change denial happens in the House, the Democrat-led Senate has also failed to exhibit substantial interest in the issue.

The Senate Commerce Science and Space Subcommittee has held four hearings on space, but only one on climate change. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hasn’t addressed the topic since 2012. The Environment and Public Works Committee has held three hearings on climate change this Congress.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/**2014**/05/22/congress-climate-change-aliens_n_5372168.html

]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/lamar-smith-climate-change-denial_n_6123638.html

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 about97 percentof 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.

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 stafferson 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 Dutkoand 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,cementand 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’sstaff, 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 CitiesStudy and another sponsored by theAmerican Cancer Society, known as the Cancer Prevention Study II, need to be made public so that it can beanalyzed 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.” [HORNER? LISA JACKSON JIHAD?]

“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....

1 0f 3 huffpo

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

2/15

3 on seti, lamar smith 2 on GW

killed investigation of.....

HBGary bought by def contr Man Tech, GH helped FBI go for Anon. got Sabu

hbg fed did less well and AB stepped down and co folded end of feb 2011: getting personal threats and i have 2 kids.

other 2 co's team themis leads know what was going on, and palantir one used language almost verbatim on WL “ proactive tactics' hmm jargon?

lead congr Hank Johnson wanted to know why tax $ wasted to spy on americans ~ 1st amend;quashed by Lamar Smith; press never asked why killed.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/gop-congressman-lamar-smith-declares-war-nasa-and-epa-climate-science-research

Smith, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, has declared war on the Obama administration, NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undermine attempts to prevent dangerous climate change.

Speaking at the Heartland Institute’s climate denier conference in Washington, D.C., last Thursday, the Texas congressman described how three subpoenas for EPA staff emails and texts have now been issued following claims about “secret emails” and personal use of email accounts by the agency.

This follows a similar-spirited freedom of information request submitted to the EPA by Chris Horner, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute supported by the ExxonMobil funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Smith, chairman of the science, space and technology committee said at the conference that “regulation should be based on sound science not science fiction.”

“The science is clear and overwhelming but not in the way the President says. The fact is there is little evidence that climate change causes extreme weather events.”

Clean Power Plan

Smith’s speech comes only two days after a federal court dismissed a lawsuit by the nation’s largest coal companies and 14 coal-producing states that sought to block President Obama’s clamp-down on power plant emissions.

“The president’s power plan is nothing more than a power play. It will give the government more control over Americans’ daily lives. These regulations stifle economic growth, destroy jobs and increase energy prices,” said Smith.

He continued: “The EPA justify their dictatorial approach by claiming regulations will slow global climate change and reduce carbon emissions. But heavy handed regulation and arbitrary emission targets will do lasting damage to our economy all for little environment impact.”

In an effort to counter the EPA’s “most aggressive regulatory agenda in its 40 year history,” Smith’s Secret Science Reform Act was passed by the House in March to prohibit the EPA form implementing a regulation unless it makes public all related data, scientific analyses and materials.

Smith argues the bill will increase transparency and stop the EPA using “hidden and flawed” science. However, 40 scientific institutions and universities have now opposed the billarguing it will severely hamper the EPA form carrying out its mission to protect public health and the environment.

Lord Monckton praised Smith’s speech as “the best informed, most passionate and splendid speeches on climate I have every heard from any politician.”

Monckton joined Smith in his attack on science in calling for a Congressional investigation into the conduct of the Smithsonian and Harvard University in their treatment of Willie Soon, who failed to disclose conflicts of interest in his research funded by ExxonMobil.

Cut Off the Money

In response to audience calls to “cut off the money” from climate change research Smith highlighted the fact that NASA’s budget on earth science was cut by 40 percent just last week. This was met with cheers and applause from the room.

He added: “The second cut we made that you will appreciate [is to the] National Science Foundation, [which] we also have jurisdiction for, we reset [its] priorities, which we are entitled to do.

“We moved a lot of money out of the social science into the hard sciences that typically bear results. We’re trying to get the NSF out of the business of awarding grants such as $1,260,000 (£800,000) for someone to write an off-broadway musical on climate change.”

Heartland Activists

Earlier in the day, the conference was kicked-off by Senator James Inhofe, who now chairs the Senate environment and public works committee despite calling global warming “the greatest hoax every perpetrated on the American people.”

Inhofe urged Heartland activists to go out and fight against what he called “the myth of global warming.”

“If you look at the Republican [Presidential] candidates, they’re all denying this stuff,” Inhofe said. “They’re all with people in this room.”

He continued: “This is where you guys come in now, you’re all activists, I really mean that.”

Inhofe, whose message was that “God is still up there”, later told reports that the Pope Francis should butt out of climate change: “The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours.”

He concluded his speech with a call to arms: “We’ve got a country we’ve got to save, and we’ve got to do it together. If you join us, if we do this as a team, we’ll be doing the Lord’s work and he will richly bless you for it. Amen.”

http://www.alternet.org/environment/gop-congressman-lamar-smith-declares-war-nasa-and-epa-climate-science-research

Speaking at the Heartland Institute’s climate denier conference in Washington, D.C., last Thursday, the Texas congressman described how three subpoenas for EPA staff emails and texts have now been issued following claims about “secret emails” and personal use of email accounts by the agency.

Smith, chairman of the science, space and technology committeesaid at the conference that “regulation should be based on sound science not science fiction.”

“The science is clear and overwhelming but not in the way the President says. The fact is there is little evidence that climate change causes extreme weather events.”

Clean Power Plan

He continued: “The EPA justify their dictatorial approach by claiming regulations will slow global climate change and reduce carbon emissions. But heavy handed regulation and arbitrary emission targets will do lasting damage to our economy all for little environment impact.”

In an effort to counter the EPA’s “most aggressive regulatory agenda in its 40 year history,” Smith’s Secret Science Reform Act was passed by the House in March to prohibit the EPA form implementing a regulation unless it makes public all related data, scientific analyses and materials.

Smith argues the bill will increase transparency and stop the EPA using “hidden and flawed” science. However, 40 scientific institutions and universities have now opposed the bill arguing it will severely hamper the EPA form carrying out its mission to protect public health and the environment.

Lord Monckton praised Smith’s speech as “the best informed, most passionate and splendid speeches on climate I have every heard from any politician.”

He added: “The second cut we made that you will appreciate [is to the] National Science Foundation, [which] we also have jurisdiction for, we reset [its] priorities, which we are entitled to do.

“We moved a lot of money out of the social science into the hard sciences that typically bear results.We’re trying to get the NSF out of the business of awarding grants such as $1,260,000 (£800,000) for someone to write an off-broadway musical on climate change.”

Heartland Activists

Inhofe urged Heartland activists to go out and fight against what he called “the myth of global warming.”

“If you look at the Republican [Presidential] candidates, they’re all denying this stuff,” Inhofe said. “They’re all with people in this room.”

He continued: “This is where you guys come in now, you’re all activists, I really mean that.”

concluded his speech with a call to arms: “We’ve got a country we’ve got to save, and we’ve got to do it together. If you join us, if we do this as a team, we’ll be doing the Lord’s work and he will richly bless you for it. Amen.”

4/15

A Senate committee has advanced legislation that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science to craft regulations intended to protect the environment and public health, the Hill reported Tuesday.

On party line votes, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-9 to approve the “Secret Science Reform Act,” a bill to prohibit the EPA from using science that includes private data, or data that can’t be easily reproduced. The bill has been pushed strongly by House Republicans for the last two years, but this is the first time it has been advanced by the Senate.It is sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY).

The purpose of the Secret Science bill, according to its House sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), is to stop “hidden and flawed” science from being the basis of EPA regulations. However, many scientific organizations have disagreed with this characterization.

For example, approximately 50 scientific societies and universities said the bill would prohibit the EPA from using many large-scale public health studies, because their data “could not realistically be reproduced.” In addition, many studies use private medical data, trade secrets, and industry data that cannot legally be made public.

“The legislation may sound reasonable, but it’s actually a cynical attack on the EPA’s ability to do its job,” said Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. “This bill would make it impossible for the EPA to use many health studies, since they often contain private patient information that can’t and shouldn’t be revealed.”

Republicans in support of the bill have countered that the EPA could still use data within the studies without disclosing personal information or trade secrets. But it wouldn’t be cheap for those studies to meet the bill’s requirements, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO reported last year that the EPA relies on approximately 50,000 scientific studies to craft its regulations per year, and that meeting the goals of the “Secret Science” bill would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 per study.

When the legislation was moving through the House, Democratic opponents called it disingenuous — a perceived play for “transparency” within the EPA, when all Republicans really want is less EPA regulation. Environmentally-minded Senators on Tuesday seemed to agree. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told the Hill that the bill was “just a joke,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — who is expected to announce a Presidential bid on Thursday — reportedly called it “laughable.”

For its part, the White House has already threatened to vetothe bill if it does come to President Obama’s desk. Obama made the same threat last year when the House passed a similar bill, but the legislation did not reach the then-Democrat controlled Senate.

Now, a notoriously anti-EPA Republican leading the Senate makes it all the more likely that Obama will have to use his veto pen on the Secret Science Reform Act. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said his top priority is “to try to do whatever I can to get the EPA reined in.”

Over objections from the White House and many science and environmental groups, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives this week approved two bills that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) obtains and uses scientific data and advice. The bills aren’t likely to become law this year, but they are fueling an intense political battle that is likely to resurface when the new Congress convenes in January.

Proponents of the bills, which the House passed almost entirely with GOP votes, say they would increase transparency in how EPA uses data to justify its regulations and result in better, more balanced scientific advice for the agency. “EPA has an extensive track record of twisting the science to justify their actions,” and so reform is needed, said Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), head of the House science committee, in a statement supporting one of the bills.

But opponents say the legislation would do more harm than good. “These bills are the culmination of one of the most anti-science and anti-health campaigns I’ve witnessed in my 22 years as a member of Congress,” said RepresentativeEddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX), top Democrat on the House science committee, in a statement.

White House officials say they would recommend that President Barack Obama veto the legislation if it reaches his desk. That’s unlikely in the current Congress, which ends next month, given that Democrats still hold a majority in the Senate. That makes the votes largely symbolic. But observers say they represent another salvo in a long-standing battle over therelease of scientific data that underlines key regulations—and a sign of battles to come once Republicans assume control of both chambers of Congress in January.

One bill, approved 18 November on a mostly party-line 229 to 191 vote, would overhaul rules regarding the membership and meetings of EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB). That federally chartered body of scientists, economists, and other scholars reviews agency risk assessments and scientific documents and advises the agency on other matters.The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act (H.R. 1422), sponsored by Representative Chris Stewart (R–UT), would require the agency to make SAB’s membership “fairly balanced,” add more public comment opportunities, require more acknowledgment of dissenting panelists’ views, bar panelists from discussing their own research, and limit nonscientific advice from the panel. “Ensuring that the [board] is balanced and transparent will help instill more confidence in the EPA’s decision making process,” Stewart said in a statement.

The bill would seek to balance membership by setting a quota for state, local, and tribal government officials on SAB panels and clarify that industry experts aren’t barred from membership as long as their potential conflicts of interest are disclosed.

The second bill, the Secret Science Reform Act (H.R. 4012), would require that the data from any study that EPA draws upon to inform its regulations, risk assessments, and guidance documents be “reproducible” and released publicly as long as the law doesn’t forbid it. “If you’re going to make public policy, do it by public data,” said RepresentativeDavid Schweikert (R–AZ), the bill’s lead sponsor and chair of the House science committee’s environmental subpanel, on the House floor on 19 November. The House approved the measure on a mostly party-line 237 to 190 vote.

Trade associations in key industries—from chemicals to oil to natural gas—support the bills, saying that boosting data transparency and changing SAB’s composition would result in more scientifically sound, and thus publicly trusted, regulations.

Opponents, however, say the bills are thinly disguised efforts to make EPA’s job more difficult.

For instance, the EPA SAB reform act could “turn conflict of interest on its head” by opening the door to more representation from industry scientists, says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science and environmental advocacy group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A White House statementargues that the new membership requirements “could preclude the nomination of scientists with significant expertise in their fields.”

Public health groups, scientists, and environmental groups warned in a letter to lawmakersthat the bill would grind SAB to a halt by requiring an “endless loop” of public comment and responses from the panel to almost every comment. “At best, the SAB will be reduced to busy work. At worst, the SAB’s assessments will address the concerns of corporations, not the desires of citizens for science-informed regulation that protects public health,” the letter argues.

The “secret science” bill could drastically cut the number of studies that EPA would be allowed to use in developing rules, the advocates’ letter argues. By requiring “reproducible” data, the bill “seems to adopt a very narrow view of scientific information solely based on laboratory experiments,” it argues, noting that many studies that EPA traditionally relies on involve modeling or analyzing real-world health data, which can be hard to replicate.

H.R. 4012 could also rule out EPA’s use of other studies involving confidential health information, which can be important, critics say. And the bill’s requirements “could be used to prevent EPA from finalizing regulations until legal challenges about the legitimate withholding of certain scientific and technical information are resolved,” a White House statement warns.

Rosenberg argues that the real purpose of H.R. 4012 is to enable EPA critics to obtain data and turn it over to their own analysts, in order to pick apart studies they don’t like and produce findings more favorable to their views. “The problem they’re trying to fix is, they don’t like the answer” provided by certain studies, he says.

Both bills, or similar versions, are likely to resurface in the new Congress.

Posted in Environment, Policy

http://www.alternet.org/print/speakeasy/tikkundaily/environmental-justice-and-science-denial

The White House recently released its National Climate Assessment [4] that reported our global climate is, in fact, changing, and this is due primarily to human activity, in particular, the burning of fossil fuels. The Assessment investigated approximately 12,000 professional scientific journal papers on the topic of global climate change, and discovered that in the articles expressing a position on global warming, 97 percent fully authenticated both the reality of global warming and the certainty that humans are the cause.

Additional studies released since the White House report signaled the beginning of the depletion and ultimate total collapse of glaciers in Antarctica, which can continue to raise worldwide sea levels an additional 4 feet. This depletion is now irreversible.

What seems clear to the scientific community seems like science fiction to many key politicians, includingLamar Smith (R-TX), paradoxically the Chair of the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who has been a perennial skeptic of human-produced climate change. He stated on the floor of the House[5]:

"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."

He quoted no sources, and his accusations were later proven [6] false.

Previous Chair of the Committee, Representative Ralph Hall (R-TX) asserted [7] that he does not have concerns about global warming, but, rather, he is "really more fearful of freezing," even though, he mentioned, "I don't have any science to prove that." He went even further by stating that he did not "think we can control what God controls."

Many on the anti-science political and theocratic Right (mis)quote scripture to justify human exploitation of the planet. For example, Republican presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum, questioned [8] Barack Obama's "theology" in an Ohio campaign stop on February 18, 2012 by asserting that Obama believes in "some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology."

The next day, when asked to explain his remarks on the CBS news program "Face the Nation [9]" by moderator Bob Schieffer, Santorum responded that he was referring to "the radical environmentalists," and by implication, placed Obama in this category. Santorum attacked the notion that "man is here to serve the Earth," which he argued "is a phony ideal." Santorum countered that idea, stating "We're not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective. I think a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside-down."

In yet another ill-conceived and executed Christian crusade, Santorum, with his publicly expressed literal biblical perspective, conjures up such passages as Genesis 1:26, which states:

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'"

Also, Genesis 1:28: "God blessed [humans] and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.'"

And, Genesis 9: "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.'"

And Santorum is certainly not alone among his Republican colleagues and electorate. A 2008 study [10] by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, "A Deeper Partisan Divide over Global Warming," found that 58 percent of respondents who identified as Democrats and 50 percent of Independents believed that global warming is mostly caused by human activity, while only 27 percent of Republicans believed this.

Among Democrats, those with higher educational levels - 75 percent with college degrees compared with 52 percent with less education - expressed the view that solid evidence has shown human activity largely as the cause of global warming. Opposed to the Democrats, however, educational levels of Republicans resulted in an inverse relationship in trusting the scientific evidence with only 19 percent of Republican college graduates compared with 31 percent with less education believing in the human connection to climate change.

Pew's updated [11] report in 2013 found that overall 67 percent of U.S. residents believe global warming is happening, but only 25 percent of Tea Party Republicans believe this.....

*milloy;

House Science Committee subpoenas EPA secret science

Posted on August 1, 2013 by Steve Milloy | 3 Comments

A great moment in the fight against junk science.

The House Science Committee media release is below.

###

Smith Subpoenas EPA’s Secret Science

AUG 1, 2013

Washington, D.C. – Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today issued a subpoena to the EPA, forcing the agency to release the secret science it uses as the basis for costly air regulations.

Over the past two years, the Committee has repeatedly requested the data the agency uses to justify virtually every Clean Air Act regulation proposed and finalized by the Obama administration. This was the first congressional subpoena the Science Committee has issued in 21 years.

Chairman Smith: “In September 2011, the EPA’s then-Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy committed to make the data sets available to the Committee. Even though Ms. McCarthy now leads the agency, she has yet to provide the promised data to the Committee.

“This subpoena could have been avoided. Unfortunately, we’ve been put in this position by an agency that willfully disregards congressional requests and makes its rules using undisclosed data. After two years [HORNER JACKSON?] of failing to respond, it’s clear that the EPA is not going to give the American people what they deserve—the truth about regulations.

“The EPA should not base its regulations on secret data. By denying the Committee’s request, the agency prevents Congress from fulfilling its oversight responsibilities and denies the American people the ability to verify EPA’s claims. The EPA’s lack of cooperation contributes to the suspicion that the data sets do not support the agency’s actions. The American people deserve all of the facts and have a right to know whether the EPA is using good science.”

The two data sets in question are used to justify major costly new air regulations. As one example, by its own estimates the EPA’s proposed limits on ozone will cost taxpayers $90 billion per year, making it the most costly regulation the federal government has ever issued. Some of the data in question is up to 30-years-old.

Over the last two years, the Science Committee has sent six letters to the EPA and other top administration officials. But the administration has refused to substantively respond to the requests. Under the EPA’s current process, only a select few who support the EPA’s agenda are authorized to access and analyze the data. But this ignores the need for congressional oversight of taxpayer-funded research.

During the meeting, Chairman Smith made clear that any personal health information that is in the data will be protected and removed before the data is made public. He asserted that ensuring public access to taxpayer funded data that is used in regulations is good science and good government.

This afternoon, the Committee voted to approve a resolution authorizing the Chairman to issue a subpoena for the data in question. Chairman Smith subsequently signed the subpoena, which legally obliges the EPA to provide the data to the Committee.

A copy of the subpoena can be found here.

3 takedowns of the GOP's latest climate change skeptic

Rep. Lamar Smith blasts environmentalists for their "overheated rhetoric" on climate change. They waste little time in firing right back.

PUBLISHED MAY 21, 2013, AT 5:30 PM

In an op-ed in the Washington Post this week, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee and a noted climate change skeptic, offered a laundry list of reasons why people who are worried about climate change and fighting plans like the Keystone XL pipeline are hurting American policy and the country's economy.

Predictably, climate change believers were quick to deliver counterpoints. Here are three of Smith's main points, along with the reactions of his critics.

(And for context: 97 percent of climatologists say global warming is directly linked to human-made carbon emissions.)

1. Smith says climate change is not linked to extreme weather patterns.

In his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama said that extreme weather events have become "more frequent and intense," and he linked Superstorm Sandy to climate change.

But experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have told the New York Times that climate change had nothing to do with Superstorm Sandy. This is underscored by last year's IPCC report stating that there is "high agreement" among leading experts that trends in weather disasters, floods, tornados and storms cannot be attributed to climate change. While these claims may make for good political theater, their effect on recent public policy choices hurts the economy. [*Washington Post*]

Smith's critics counter that of course climate change is linked to extreme weather patterns — it even says so in that IPCC report. An excerpt:

There is evidence that some extremes have changed as a result of anthropogenic influences, including increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It is likely that anthropogenic influences have led to warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures at the global scale. There is medium confidence that anthropogenic influences have contributed to intensification of extreme precipitation at the global scale. It is likely that there has been an anthropogenic influence on increasing extreme coastal high water due to an increase in mean sea level. [IPCC]

2. Smith says the Keystone pipeline would not harm the environment.

The State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate. Recent expert testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology confirms this finding. In fact, even if the pipeline is approved and is used at maximum capacity, the resulting increase in carbon dioxide emissions would be a mere 12 one-thousandths of 1 percent (0.0012 percent). There is scant scientific or environmental justification for refusing to approve the pipeline, a project that the State Department has also found would generate more than 40,000 U.S. jobs. [*Washington Post*]

Smith's critics say that not only would Keystone hurt the environment, it wouldn't be nearly as good for jobs as Smith suggests.

In a thorough take-down of Smith's op-ed, *Think Progress*'s Ryan Kornowski argues that what Smith says "just isn't true."

The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department's Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project's carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith's claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants' worth of carbon dioxide each year. [*Think Progress*]

3. Smith says global temperatures haven't risen in the last 15 years.

Contrary to model predictions, data released in October from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit show that global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions. [*Washington Post*]

Smith's critics note that warming trends are clear and undeniable. Here's *Climate Nexus*:

Warming has continued to increase, and models have predicted warming accurately. Current atmospheric temperatures are on the lower end of projections but still within the bounds of variation predicted by modeling. Furthermore, ocean warming has continued unabated, and sea level rise and Arctic ice melt have exceeded estimates. To say that "global" warming has stopped or stalled is simply wrong. [*Climate Nexus*]

7. It’s Only Science If Republicans Agree With It

In perhaps the most unintentionally revealing law ever written by a Republican on science,Texas Representative Lamar Smith recently proposed that all scientific knowledge get his okay first. Called the “High Quality Research Act,” Smith’s bill would require any research receiving federal funds [30] to go through Smith’s Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology, all in the name of “accountability.” Accountability in this case means agreeing with Smith, a climate change denier who has no problem going after projects [31] he, or his donors, disapprove of.

Climate-denying GOP rep wants to take science-funding decisions away from scientists

By John Upton

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a**climate skeptic**who**somehow became chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology**, wants Congress to meddle in decisions about which science research efforts should get government funding.

Perhaps that’s because scientists have a scary track record of finding out bothersome stuff. Like about climate change and whatnot.

From ScienceInsider:

The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.

The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), represents the latest—and bluntest—attack on NSF by congressional Republicans seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being funded in the social sciences. Last month, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national security. Smith’s draft bill, called the “High Quality Research Act,” would apply similar language to NSF’s entire research portfolio across all the disciplines that it supports.

The National Science Foundation, which has a $7 billion annual budget, funds a wide variety of research on climate change, among many other topics. From an NSF climate change report [PDF]:

NSF funding through the decades has led to many of the most fundamental discoveries and advances in human knowledge about the causes and consequences of global climate change and variability. Paleoclimate records, computational climate models, and economic models of climate change are just some examples of the major contributions of NSF’s investments in this area.

Fortunately, with Barack Obama in the White House and Democrats in control of the Senate, maneuvers like this generally turn out to be little more than time-wasting chest-thumping by anti-science charlatans. So long as that is the case, American scientists can continue to further our understanding of how fossil-fuel addiction is recasting our environment — and what we could do about it.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lamar_Smith

Lamar Seeligson Smith, a Republican, has represented the Twenty-First Congressional District of Texas in the United States House of Representatives since 1986. (map)

Contents

Record and controversies

General information about important bills and votes for can be found in Congresspedia's articles on legislation. You can add information you find on how Lamar Smith voted by clicking the "[edit]" link to the right and typing it in. Remember to cite your sources!

Iraq War

Smith voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 that started the Iraq War.^[1]

For more information see the chart of U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Iraq War.

Environmental record

For more information on environmental legislation, see the Energy and Environment Policy Portal

OPEN Government Act

On March 5, 2007, Smith introduced the OPEN Government Act of 2007, a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, in the House. It was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Main article: OPEN Government Act of 2007

Cape Cod Residence

Lamar Smith purportedly spends most of his time on Cape Cod. His house on the Cape, close to the Kennedy Family compound at Hyannisport, is valued at somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, according to his Financial Disclosure Statement for the Calendar Year 2005[1], easily more than his residence in his own district, valued at $190,000, according to the Bexar County Appraisal District [2].

Views on Immigration

In September of 2005, a fax intended for Karl Rove was intercepted in which Lamar Smith stated:

"Immigration needs to be considered in the context of: (1). Media Bias, (2). Animosity toward the president and (3) the feelings of the Republican base."

Smith is a member of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims as well as the Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity. No issues regarding the legislative jurisdiction of these committees were mentioned in the memo.

Smith also suggests that "Liberals can easily and accurately be painted as opposing enforcement." [3]

Orphan works copyright legislation

On May 22, 2006, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), then ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, introduced the Orphan Works Act of 2006 (H.R. 5439). ^[2] The bill would “limit the remedies available in a copyright infringement action if the infringer proves that: (1) the infringer performed and documented a reasonably diligent search in good faith to locate the copyright owner before using the work, but was unable to locate the owner; and (2) the infringing use of the work provided attribution to the author and owner of the copyright, if known.” ^[3]

The bill received no cosponsors, was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, and never received a vote on the floor. ^[4]

On September 12, 2006, Smith introduced the Copyright Modernization Act of 2006, (H.R. 6052) which would “amend title 17, United States Code, to provide for licensing of digital delivery of musical works and to provide for limitation of remedies in cases in which the copyright owner cannot be located, and for other purposes.” ^[5]

The bill included the orphan works provisions originally introduced in the Orphan Works Act of 2006, and also included other measures regarding intellectual property rights.^[6][7] Like his other bill, Smith's measure attracted no cosponsors, was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, and never received a vote on the floor. ^[8]

Main article: orphan works legislation

DC voting rights

When the District of Columbia Fair and Equal Voting Rights Act of 2007 passsed the House on April 19, 2007, with a vote of 241-177, Rep. Smith filed a motion to recommit to require an expedited judicial review for the legislation, which many Republican members said is unconstitutional. The motion, however, failed.

Main article: District of Columbia Fair and Equal Voting Rights Act of 2007

Bio

Background

Smith was born November 19, 1947 in San Antonio, Texas and graduated fromT.M.I., The Episcopal School of Texas and Yale University. Smith was elected to the Texas House of Representatives as a Republican in 1980. He served as Bexar County, Texas commissioner from 1982 to 1985. Smith is a follower of Christian Science.

Congressional Career

He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1986.

Positions and Views

A conservative, Smith has advocated ways to reduce illegal immigration and has opposed proposals by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to offer legal status to some categories of immigrants who have entered the country illegally.

2006 elections

In 2006, the Democrats nominated John Courage, and the Libertarian Party nominated James Arthur Strohm to face Smith in his November 2006 bid for reelection. (See U.S. congressional elections in 2006) [4] Smith retained his seat.

Money in politics

National Auto DealersAssn	$90,650	$0	$90,650
AT&T Inc	$86,900	$7,100	$79,800
Dell Inc	$79,446	$44,450	$34,996
National Cable & Telecommunications Assn	$70,392	$2,000	$68,392
Clear Channel Communications	$68,350	$48,850	$19,500
Valero Energy	$67,500	$8,750	$58,750
American Bankers Assn	$57,000	$0	$57,000
National Assn of Realtors	$54,560	$0	$54,560
Microsoft Corp	$51,500	$1,000	$50,500
Verizon Communications	$51,250	$0	$51,250
United Services Automobile Assn Group	$50,750	$9,800	$40,950
American Institute of CPAs	$49,000	$0	$49,000
Zachry Construction	$45,450	$31,950	$13,500
National Assn of Home Builders	$45,100	$0	$45,100
American Medical Assn	$44,800	$0	$44,800
Time Warner	$44,500	$3,500	$41,000
Comcast Corp	$42,000	$10,000	$32,000
Phoenix Management	$39,950	$39,950	$0
USAA	$39,050	$9,050	$30,000
National Beer Wholesalers Assn	$37,800	$0	$37,800

This section contains links to – and feeds from – money in politics databases. cid=N00001811&cycle=2006

LONGHORN PAC

PO BOX 30844

BETHESDA, MD 20824

Treasurer Name:	STONE, OLENE
Committee Designation:	D (LEADERSHIP PAC)
Committee Type:	Q (QUALIFIED NON-PARTY(SEE 2USC SECT.441(A)(4)))

2012:

Download: | View Top 20 | Top 100

Click on arrows to view detailed data.| CC Media Holdings | | | | $20,800 | $18,300 | $2,500 |

2	Express Scripts	$20,363	$10,363	$10,000
3	Comcast Corp	$20,000	$10,000	$10,000
4	Time Warner	$13,500	$3,500	$10,000
5	USAA	$12,500	$2,500	$10,000
5	Valero Energy	$12,500	$2,500	$10,000
7	Ernst & Young	$11,000	$1,000	$10,000
7	Republic National Distributing	$11,000	$11,000	$0
9	WellMed Medical Management	$10,500	$10,500	$0
10	Altria Group	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	American Bankers Assn	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	AT&T Inc	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Barger Broadcast Investments	$10,000	$10,000	$0
10	CSX Corp	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Dell Inc	$10,000	$5,000	$5,000
10	Deloitte LLP	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Energy Transfer Equity	$10,000	$10,000	$0
10	Honeywell International	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Koch Industries	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	KPMG LLP	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Life Technologies Corp	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Microsoft Corp	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	National Assn of Convenience Stores	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	National Auto Dealers Assn	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	National Beer Wholesalers Assn	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	National Cable & Telecommunications Assn	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	National Thoroughbred Racing Assn	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Norfolk Southern	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	PricewaterhouseCoopers	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Texas Med Clinic	$10,000	$10,000	$0
10	Union Pacific Corp	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Wal-Mart Stores	$10,000	$0	$10,000
10	Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America	$10,000	$0	$10,000

*registrants, or active lobbying firm

Retired	$532,739
Oil & Gas	$513,897
TV/Movies/Music	$499,245
Misc Finance	$463,800
Lawyers/Law Firms	$459,959
Computers/Internet	$432,690
Health Professionals	$406,659
Insurance	$290,633
Real Estate	$290,372
Commercial Banks	$224,418
Livestock	$218,750
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products	$212,700
Automotive	$210,650
Telephone Utilities	Telephone Utilities

Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.	Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.	Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.
Fundraising profile:	2006 election cycle	Career totals
Top contributors by organization/corporation:	2006 election cycle	Career totals
Top contributors by industry:	2006 election cycle	Career totals

Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith

from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.

Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith

from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.

Links to more campaign contribution information for Lamar Smith

from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org site.

Fundraising profile:

2006 election cycle

Career totals

Top contributors by organization/corporation:

2006 election cycle

Career totals

Top contributors by industry:

2006 election cycle

Career totals

Revolving door profile for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.
2006 privately funded travel profile for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.
Personal finance profile for Lamar Smith from the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org website.

Committees and Affiliations

Committees

Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)

House Committee on Homeland Security
- Subcommittee on Economic Security Infrastructure Protection and Cybersecurity
- Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness Science and Technology

House Committee on the Judiciary
- Subcommittee on Task Force on Antitrust
- Subcommittee on Courts the Internet and Intellectual Property - Chair
- Subcommittee on Immigration Border Security and Claims

House Committee on Science
- Subcommittee on Research
- Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics

House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct

Coalitions and Caucuses

Assistant Whip
Congressional Grace Caucus
Congressional Sportsman's Caucus
House G.O.P. Economic Task Force

Boards and other Affiliations

More Background Data

Background information on Lamar Smith from Project Vote Smart

Interest group scorecard ratings for Lamar Smith from Project Vote Smart

Voting record for Lamar Smith from the Washington Post database

Information on Lamar Smith from Congress Merge

Wikipedia also has an article on Lamar Smith. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

SMITH, Lamar REP

Committee assignments

...

Congresswoman Defends NOAA Scientists From Lamar Smith 'Witch Hunt'

BY KATHERINE BAGLEY, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

Hassling a scientist for unwelcome results

Hassling a scientist for unwelcome politics

Hassling a prestigious research organization for funding studies with funny names

Worse than the Benghazi committee

Climate Scientist Faces Backlash for Urging Investigation of Fossil Fuel Companies

Jagadish Shukla will be questioned by a Congressional committee after he and other scientists called for a racketeering probe of deliberate climate denial.

A History of Inquiries

House Science Chair Says Latest Climate Report Is 'Clearly Biased,' But He Only Read The Summary

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

House Science Committee subpoenas EPA secret science

Climate-denying GOP rep wants to take science-funding decisions away from scientists

Record and controversies

Iraq War

Environmental record

OPEN Government Act

Cape Cod Residence

Views on Immigration

Orphan works copyright legislation

DC voting rights

Bio

Background

Congressional Career

Positions and Views

2006 elections

Money in politics

Committees and Affiliations

Committees

Committee assignments in the 109th Congress (2005-2006)

Coalitions and Caucuses

Boards and other Affiliations

More Background Data

Attachments