Coming to a Magic Frank column sometime soon

by: Eric B.

Wed Jul 01, 2009 at 12:58:29 PM EDT

Well, it's only a matter of time before the Alan Carlin controversy shows up someplace in the pages of the Detroit News, or one of the intellectual dishrags in the state's conservative blogging community starts waving his or her arms around and a-hootin' and a-hollerin' about the EPA crushing conservative viewpoints.  Considering that Debbie Stabenow and/or Carl Levin could be key votes to getting a cap-and-trade through Congress, we should probably get out ahead of it.

To sum up ... an EPA economist named Alan Carlin submitted an unsolicited report trying to cast doubt on the scientific consensus of global warming as the so-called Endangerment draft were circulating.  The Endangerment study is expected to be the precursor to the EPA taking up the authority granted to it by the U.S. Supreme Court to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Anyway, the EPA -- or rather, people at the EPA responsible for putting the thing together -- looked at the unsolicited report that Carlin wrote on his own time, and opted not to include it in the final comments.  Then, Carlin was sent a few e-mails expressing as much and also advising him to do the job he was hired in 1971 to do, which is offer economic analysis ... not vet climate science.

Since then, the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- a rightwing think tank that has over the years gotten a substantial amount of money from fossil fuel companies -- got ahold of the e-mails and has been calling it a case of the EPA quashing science that didn't fit into presupposed conclusions.

more...

This charge leveled at the EPA might sound familiar to you, because it actually did happen there during the Bush administration.  Well, except for that one paper that Bush dismissed as the product of the bureaucracy (translation -- "expertise is for eggheads, real men charge forward without thinking").

Here is a draft of the report, which Carlin said was rushed to meet the deadline.  He's since apparently cleaned it up a bit without changing his conclusions, which are thus:

*--Global warming is caused by the sun.

*--The world is not warming; in fact, it is cooling.

*--The most economically effective way of reducing the planet's temperature is through geo-engineering (adding pollution into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun's energy back into space).

*--Because activities that have released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have improved life for people and generated wealth, it cannot in any way be bad for us.

Or, as one climate scientist described it:

So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.

Perhaps you can see why the document wasn't taken very seriously by the EPA, and why its author was told to stick to the job he was hired to do rather than freelancing in areas outside his personal expertise.

If I were prone to believing in conspiracies, I'd probably raise an eyebrow at the timing that this became public, coming as it did right before last week's vote on Waxman-Markey. Luckily, it didn't stop the House from passing the bill.  It's now in the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future due to expected hesitancy by Rust Belt Democratic senators to endorse something that everyone assumes will cause energy prices to rise.  Michigan has two of those people.