Photo Credit: Breitbart By Steve Milloy. E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.

In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”

Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added] . . .

An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA. (Read more from “Major Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules” HERE)

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Senator: Prosecute Climate Realists Under Anti-Mafia RICO Law

By Alex Newman. When former senior NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer referred last year to vicious climate alarmists as “global warming Nazis” who threaten humanity, he may have been closer to the truth than even he realized at the time. Writing in the Washington Post last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) called on the Obama administration to use the anti-gangster Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to persecute those who cast doubt on the increasingly discredited man-made global-warming theory — a theory that just four in 10 Americans believe, but that underpins a wide array of statist and globalist scheming at the national and global levels. Critics promptly ridiculed the Rhode Island senator and his bizarre conspiracy theory. But the totalitarian dream he expressed — using government to enforce ideological compliance and beliefs — represents just the tip of a tyrannical iceberg.

In his wildly inaccurate opinion piece, headlined “The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people,” Senator Whitehouse, ignoring the facts, claims that oil companies and their “allies” are “funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.” Setting aside the fact that carbon dioxide is essential to life on Earth, that human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of one percent of all the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere, and that Sheldon, like all people, exhales CO2 “pollution” every time he takes a breath, the radical senator from Rhode Island also concealed other key facts. For example, Big Oil and its beneficiaries — the Rockefeller dynasty, among others — have been among the chief promoters and financiers of global-warming alarmism from the start.

Perhaps hoping to profit from “carbon credits” gimmicks run by Al Gore and mega-bank Goldman Sachs, major oil and energy companies have been flocking to the alarmist cause. Giants such as BP America, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, PG&E, and more all joined the pro-“cap and trade” lobbying group “U.S. Climate Action Partnership.” Just this week, a cartel of the world’s top oil companies — Europe’s Statoil, Total, BP, Shell, ENI, BG, and more — demanded that the UN and its member regimes put a “price” on carbon emissions aimed at extorting consumers out of even more money under the guise of fighting “global warming.” Of course, the satellite data show there has been no global warming in almost two decades, despite contrary UN predictions and “climate models,” but Big Oil, crony Big Business, and Big Government are all demanding more anti-“carbon” scheming nonetheless.

Senator Whitehouse’s deception and extremism only get more pronounced after the initial untruths. Among other claims, the senator said the alleged activities of oil companies are “often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking.” “Thankfully,” Whitehouse claimed,” the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.” In 1999, the Justice Department filed a RICO suit against tobacco companies and industry groups claiming that they were engaged in a “50-year scheme” to “defraud the public” in violation of RICO. A federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton agreed with the DOJ (though many of her demands were overturned on appeal). And now, Senator Whitehouse wants the Obama administration to try the same tactics against those who expose the increasingly obvious flaws in the man-made global-warming theory promoted by Obama, the UN, its members, and the scientists they fund.

“The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking,” Whitehouse claimed, falsely. As evidence, he points to a memo by an industry lobbying group outlining a tentative plan to expose the flaws in the man-made global-warming theory, just a generation after the man-made global-cooling theory was exposed as a fraud. Of course, by now, the flaws in the alarmist narrative, not to mention ClimateGate and other scandals, are so obvious that the overwhelming majority of Americans reject both the cooling and warming theories. Whitehouse’s other piece of non-evidence cited in the Post column, a “study” published by Drexel University “sociologist” Robert Brulle, claimed that huge sums of “dark money” were nefariously being pumped into what he called “climate denial.” Ironically, the deceptive paper, published in Climatic Change, became a laughingstock almost immediately after its publication. (Read more from this story HERE)

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