“Secret Science” Regulation: A Time for Truth

By E. Calvin Beisner -- May 29, 2018

“Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science (STRS) will improve, not harm, the EPA’s mission to protect Americans from real environmental risks. It will also reduce the risks caused by unjustified but costly regulations. It should be adopted.”

What would you say if a major government agency imposed regulations on the basis of “scientific studies” that couldn’t be tested because their authors wouldn’t make the data, methods, and computer codes available?

“Sure, and I’ve got a bridge to sell you down in the Everglades!”

That’d be about the right response. Followed by, “Nothing doing, buster! We taxpayers pay for the research, and the agency burdens us based on it, you’d jolly well better make it public. Period.”

And you’d be absolutely right.

Background

For decades, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has built new regulations on studies whose authors refuse to grant access to their data, computer code, and methodology.…

Cornwell Alliance Petition for EPA Administrator Nominee (real environmentalism, not dogma)

By E. Calvin Beisner -- January 7, 2017

“Some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.”

January 5, 2017

Dear President-elect Donald J. Trump:

meet-scott-pruitt We write to you as evangelical and mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish scientists, economists, legal scholars, policy experts, and religious leaders in support of your nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to the office of Administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA has the crucial task of writing and enforcing regulations that apply statutes passed by Congress and signed by the President to protect the life and health of Americans.…

Open Letter to Attorneys General about Climate Change

By E. Calvin Beisner -- June 15, 2016

“[M]aybe, too—before Congress takes you to the woodshed—you’ll decide to back off your potentially felonious conspiracy to ‘injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same,’ for which you could be fined or imprisoned up to ten years, or both (18 U.S.C. 241).”

Dear Attorneys General,

You’re not stupid. Stupid people don’t graduate from law school.

Neither are you generally ignorant. You know lots of law.

But the day of the “Renaissance man,” vastly learned across all fields of knowledge, is long gone. All intelligent and learned people are ignorant about some things.

So, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and members of Attorneys General United for Clean Power, take no offense when I tell you that your intent to investigate and potentially prosecute, civilly or criminally, corporations, think tanks, and individuals for fraud, under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) or otherwise, because they question the causes, magnitude, risks, and benefits of global warming, and the best responses to it, is a dead giveaway that you’re ignorant about climate science and related climate and energy policy.…