A top Republican senator is investigating claims that the Environmental Protection Agency suppressed a report from one of its own analysts that concluded that fossil fuels are not attached to global warming.
While there is universal agreement that the planet is warming, there remain a number of unanswered questions on the causes. Given that the planet has been warming for the last 8,000 years, questions on the impact of fossil fuel combustion and other gases have been circulating.
Now, as the United States is considering pushing a climate change bill into law, a leading Republican senator is exploring a claim that the Environmental Protection Agency suppressed a report from one of their own analysts that questioned the impact of fossil fuel combustion on global warming.
"The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming,"
Fox News reported. "Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined."
"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla. told FOX News. "We're going to expose it."
Senator Inhofe intends to pursue an investigation.
Internal emails made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute showcase how Carlin's boss told him that his analysis would not be included in the broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop work on the climate change issue.
For their part, the EPA was quick to point out to Fox News that Carlin is an economist and not a scientist - and that his report included "no original research." An EPA official told Fox News that Carlin "has not been muzzled in the agency at all."
Carlin's report "noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been 'greatly diminished,.'" reported Fox News.
Carlin's boss issued an email, telling him to back off.
"The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision," Carlin's boss wrote. "I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
Republican Congressmen James Sensenbrenner and Darrell Issa wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson asking the agency to allow further investigation. The EPA denied the request.
"Citing the internal e-mails, the Republican congressmen wrote that the EPA was exhibiting an 'agency culture set in a predetermined course,'" Fox News reported.
"It documents at least one instance in which the public was denied access to significant scientific literature and raises substantial questions about what additional evidence may have been suppressed," they wrote.
