(UPDATED*) WSJournal, NYTimes, blogs & more blogs: EPA gets tough on two of its lawyers for public attack on cap and trade climate bill
Here’s a story that is just hitting the conventional news budget – meaning today – after some major media and other bloggers jumped on a story of renegade EPA lawyers. The news is that the two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, wife and husband in San Francisco. have made a video as part of their crusade against cap and trade carbon tactics. They want a fee, or tax, on carbon. They say cap and trade is too full of loopholes, waste, and potentially fraudulent offset credits to work. The video includes a brief snippet of the office building where they work, it identifies them as EPA lawyers, but they say explicitly they are speaking for themselves not the agency or the White House. The EPA wants all but the barest mention of EPA scrubbed out and, according to a memo circulating and attributed to their bosses, face disciplinary action if they don’t do it. The pair took the video off their own site but, you know how immortal videos can be these days. So it says on the various blogs and news story The Tracker has read.
One the one hand – having looked at the full video on YouTube, one must remark that the demanded edits would not change its impact much. On the other, this is the so-called age of transparency in government and freedom of expression by its employees. One can’t see this reflecting well on the administration or on its climate policy-making process. Maybe they figure that even though getting tough on this particular video only brings more eyeballs to it, in the long run they get a properly obedient set of employees. And third hand if I had one: just how hard and how new and in the end, how necessary are this administration’s efforts (and their enforcement) to stifle fed. employees who want to talk in public while defying the official line? If some consul general in the State Department told reporters the Secretary of State is full of baloney – there’s the door you chump, right?
It’s a great issue. Scientists (e.g. James Hansen) are hired to be scientists and to more or less objectively assess data and should be free to say what they think to anybody, but lawyers are hired to be lawyers – to enforce of policy and defend the agencies they work for. Mmmm. Tasty discussion.
Standard News Coverage:
- NY Times – John M. Broder, Leslie Kaufman: Environmental Agency Warns 2 STaff Lawyers Over Video Criticizing Climate Policy ;
So far it’s mostly on blogs:
- NY Times Dot Earth – John M. Broder, Leslie Kaufman (Nov. 9): E. P. A. Intervenes in video by two employees ; It went up on the blog, and now is (see bullet above) on the regular Politics news feed. It includes a link to a Wash. Post. op-ed by the couple Oct. 31, which managed to blow the whistle on themselves to EPA’s overseers. The video apparently has been circulating since September.
- NYTimes Dot Earth – Andrew C. Revkin (Nov.2) : E.P.A. Lawyers Challenge ‘Cap and Trade’ for Climate ;
- Wall St. Journal Environmental Capital – Keith Johnson: Gagged? EPA Clamps Down on Couple Critical of Cap-and-Trade ;
- Wall St. Journal Environmental Capital – Keith Johnson: If Cap-and-Trade is So Terrible, What’s the Alternative? ; Written a bit before the EPA’s blowback.
- Cold Truth/original investigative journalism Blog – Andrew Schneider: EPA lawyers ordered to remove their private concerns on climate change efforts from YouTube; Includes what is purported to be the threatening memo to the lawyers from their supervisors.
*UPDATES, More Stories:
- Washington Times Hot Button Blog – Amanda Carpenter: Top of a round up, pretty straight coverage. The paper’s conservative readership may have expected to see some source growling over the pair’s pro-tax stance, but not a whisper here.
- David Horowitz Newsreal (blog) – Claude Cartaginise : The Huge Mistake ; The site, with a conservative slant and a mission to keep the left honest, selectively relishes the pair’s attack on the government’s embrace of cap and trade – but has nothing on the even more leftist, by this general crowd’s definition, heavy carbon tax the two want to see.
- National Review Planet Gore (blog) - William Tucker: EPA Whistleblowers Try to Derail Waxman-Markey ; Whistle blowing usually refers to exposure of illegal behavior inside gov’t or biz or any other big organization. This doesn’t seem a natural fit to that definition. But, unlike in the previous bullet’s pub, while this one does use the affair to attack cap-and-trade, it mentions the motive: a big tax on carbon whose proceeds would be distributed back to the populace in an instant rebate, letting carbon-light citizens and regions make money from people and places where coal is king and SUVs rule the road. Redistribution of wealth like that usually pushes buttons at conservative gatherings, but for this case, it only elicits the comment that fat cat Congress and bureaucracy residents would skim the money for themselves.
- OhMyGov! (blog) Jenifer Reinhardt: AT EPA, a case of censorship? ; This one looks into – with a sympathetic tone – the couple’s membership in an activist group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, and that organization’s role in defending others who have gone public in ways that rankled their superiors. PEER itself (see Grist) has a press release out.
Grist for the Mill: PEER Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
