Last week we highlighted how two attorneys with the Environmental Protection Agency, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, came out strongly against a cap-and-trade system, noting that it will not ignite the kind of "clean energy revolution" that its proponents say will happen.This type of dissent apparently did not sit well with the EPA, which has now told Williams and Zabel to stop publishing their views, or at least to stop claiming that they have worked for the EPA for 20 years.
The EPA has also instructed them to take down a ten minute long YouTube video outlining their arguments against cap and trade. Here is the link to that video, although it may be gone soon.
Of course, this isn't the first time even this year that the EPA has tried to clamp down on its employees for raising concerns about administration goals. EPA analyst Alan Carlin issued a report earlier this year questioning the science behind global warming, but he claims the EPA suppressed it (Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) later called for an investigation into the matter.)
This latest incident, however, is much more pronounced. The EPA defended its muzzling of Carlin on the basis that he was an economist and his report was not done as official EPA business, a barely defensible (but defensible nonetheless) explanation.
The order to Williams and Zabel, however, has no basis except to mandate uniformity with the administration's goals and to protect the image of the EPA as interested only in bureaucratic regulation.
Without allowing dissent, scientific conclusions are not even scientific, but rather pre-arranged decisions without any legitimacy. So this raises an important question: If the EPA is now in the business of quashing dissenters, how do we know that any of their analyses are based in scientific fact rather than biased statistics that only promote the Obama administration's agenda?
