Inside the National Center for Environmental Economics, analysts scurried to finish the vital technical support document to fulfill President Obama’s most draconian campaign pledge: “Implement an economywide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.” The NCEE was ready to cement the case for the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” the official declaration that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels poses a threat to human health and welfare. Thousands of government careers, academic contracts, and Big Green grants hung in the balance, and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson needed to release it within days.
But senior research analyst Alan Carlin, Ph.D., a 38-year EPA veteran never known as an ideologue, submitted his unlikely critique that the agency’s case was full of predetermined, politically mandated, cherry-picked scientific garbage.
