Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are EPA attorneys who have taken up advocating against cap-and-trade on behalf of rebated carbon taxes, most recently in a Washington Post op-ed. They also posted a video to YouTube making many of the same arguments at somewhat greater length. Now the EPA has instructed them to take the video down by the close of business today, at pain of disciplinary action from EPA ethics officials, and to submit any future drafts to EPA officials before posting. Here it is (likely gone soon):
The issue is in how Williams & Zabel identify themselves. In the WaPo op-ed they are identified merely as “EPA attorneys.” In the video they say the following:
Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the US EPA in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.
Later, Zabel says:
In my work at EPA I have been overseeing California’s cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years. My unique and extensive experience has convinced me that carbon offsets won’t work.
EPA officials have informed Williams & Zabel that they may not reveal that they’ve worked at EPA for 20 years, or that Zabel has direct experience with offsets. They may only mention, once, that they are “EPA attorneys.”
Williams & Zabel are consulting with EPA ethics officials and seeking legal counsel. EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy said on Friday evening that she was gathering information on the issue before commenting.
When Bush administration NASA officials attempted to monitor and control what scientist James Hansen said to the press, they were rightly criticized. By the same token, even though I think many of Williams & Zabel’s policy arguments are deeply flawed, I can’t see any justification for refusing them the right to communicate honestly about their backgrounds to the public. EPA should back off.
Hot planet to Obama: What’s your Plan B?
Comments
View as Flat
hapa Posted 5:19 pm
06 Nov 2009
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Daniel Coffey Posted 8:21 pm
06 Nov 2009
The Obama administration and EPA will be making an astonishingly bad mistake if they move to suppress these two lawyers from speaking on non-confidential matters. As for their employment by EPA, that may be an issue of enhanced credibility or the suggestion that they are trading on their position, but every lawyer on the planet has the right to articulate their experience, and their current employment at "EPA (RC-2), 75 Hawthorne St., San Francisco, CA" public record.
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Daniel Coffey Posted 8:35 pm
06 Nov 2009
For example, they argue:
"What guarantees failure of the proposed climate bills, however, are their provisions for carbon offsets, a concept not used in the acid rain program. Both bills allow all required greenhouse-gas reductions for almost 20 years to be met with carbon offsets rather than actual reductions in use of the capped sources. Offsets -- considered indispensable to keeping cap-and-trade affordable -- are supposed to be "additional" reductions beyond what is legally required. But experience with offsets in Europe and California has shown that ensuring real "additionality" is not an achievable goal.
Suppose, for example, that a landowner is paid not to cut his forest so that it can continue capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Purchasing this offset allows owners of a coal-fired power plant to burn extra coal, above the cap.
But if the landowner wasn't planning to cut his forest, he just received a bonus for doing what he would have done anyway. Even if he was planning to cut his forest and doesn't, demand for wood isn't reduced. A different forest will be cut. Either way, there is no net reduction in production of greenhouse gases. The result of this carbon "offset" is not a decrease but an increase -- coal burning above the cap at the power plant.
Or consider the refrigerant HCFC-22, the manufacture of which creates an extremely powerful greenhouse gas as a byproduct. This byproduct is relatively easy and cheap to destroy, and governments could require refrigerant manufacturers to do just that. But offset investors have persuaded regulators to approve destruction of the byproduct as a carbon offset, making it twice as profitable to sell byproduct destruction as it was to sell the refrigerant.
Some have even fought to keep release of this byproduct legal because, otherwise, destruction of the byproduct would no longer produce offsets as it would no longer be "additional." The situation also creates incentive for some to make unneeded refrigerant to profit from byproduct offsets.
Carbon offsets create the illusion of "additional" greenhouse-gas reductions, but we are just getting business as usual. Untrackable shifting of economic activity and perverse incentives such as these are inherent problems for carbon offsets and cannot be solved by certification or verification processes. Since the most flawed offsets will be the cheapest, they will also be the most popular.
The House and Senate climate bills are not a first step in the right direction. They would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion-dollar carbon-offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions. Together, the illusion of greenhouse-gas reductions and the creation of powerful lobbies seeking to protect newly created profits in permits and offsets would lock in climate degradation for a decade or more. The near-term opportunity to create an effective international framework would also be lost."
I should note that some of the technical - chemical references are hard to verify for accuracy because, for example, the word "byproduct" has little meaning.
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isaacschumann Posted 8:20 am
10 Nov 2009
this is the major problem with cap and trade, i too am very skeptical of carbon offsets. Policy needs to make emitting carbon increasingly costly (as well as any damage to the ecosystem). as it stands now, the very real costs of our actions (degradation of habitat and the like) are born by the environment as well as the poorest among us, the least deserving. these costs are better paid now in the form of a carbon tax by the people or institutions emitting the carbon, than in the future in the form of environmental degradation and human suffering.
a successful program has to make the emission of carbon expensive, so that the ONLY way to avoid that expense is to not emit carbon. if you plan on keeping the u.s. a free country, you pretty much have to embrace some form of market based policy. or else glenn beck gets to be right for once. (shudder)
cheers,
isaac
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megaloptera Posted 10:08 pm
06 Nov 2009
Zabel and Williams have revealed that cap and trade does more harm than good and along with former EPA whistle blower Jim Hansen document that H.R. 2454 and the Kerry-Boxer bill are scams that rip-off the American people.
Let's face it, these are "energy and economy" bills, not climate change bills. The climate legislation drafted by Kerry Boxer, Waxman Markey and Bingaman will bankrupt the country and make climate change worse - full of false solutions like biomass, and corporate give aways. They should be scrapped -- and are worse than doing nothing at all.
Climate SOS
http://www.climatesos.org
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mach37 Posted 11:39 pm
06 Nov 2009
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ShalomCtr Posted 1:59 am
07 Nov 2009
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Dave from Canada Posted 3:36 pm
07 Nov 2009
It's actually normal - and perfectly reasonable - for employers to limit the extent to which employees represent a position to the media when it's not the employer's position and when those employees use the employer's name.
Do you think Exxon (or the US Chamber of Commerce) would allow employees to say they have worked for them on issue X for 20 years and then proceed to publicly undermine their policy positions?
The difference with the Bush-era censorship was that they were actually censoring the conclusions of scientific studies. In this case, the EPA is merely saying that these folks need to be more circumspect in describing their employment (while still being able to say they work for the EPA).
The current case is an employment issue, and what Bush was doing was censorship. They are different.
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randino Posted 3:49 pm
07 Nov 2009
The unanimity around Kerry Boxer or Waxman Markey is an illusion.
Randy Cunningham
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rpauli Posted 4:16 pm
07 Nov 2009
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kkloor Posted 7:35 am
08 Nov 2009
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Alida Antonia Cornelius Posted 7:29 am
09 Nov 2009
My reasons are based on how the government is trying to save wetlands, by allowing developers to destroy a wetlands, but "buy" an existing one, which will never be touched, or to "make" a new one, which may only last for five years.
Wetlands are still disappearing.
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hank Posted 12:02 pm
09 Nov 2009
I'm going to post an excerpt from email (while asking the writer to get directly and identifiabl involved) defending _some_ carbon offsets:
"... Their example of forest offsets is grossly oversimplified. Any private forest that lacks protection is subject to harvest or, worse, conversion to other uses and average land tenure among small private forests in the US is SEVEN YEARS! Thus, the 'not planning to harvest it' argument doesn't hold up. The 'leakage' argument doesn't account for the fact that harvest can continue, just w a lot more forest structure maintained (ie more carbon stored than the industrial model). High quality offsets like [the one I'm in touch with] deal w these issues head on. Deforestation also causes 20-25% of net emissions, so if you don't incorporate them into the carbon economy, you're leaving a huge piece of the system out....."
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OrganicGeorge Posted 12:26 pm
09 Nov 2009
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OrganicGeorge Posted 12:28 pm
09 Nov 2009
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jb943 Posted 1:16 pm
09 Nov 2009
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OrganicGeorge Posted 1:45 pm
09 Nov 2009
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Alida Antonia Cornelius Posted 7:20 pm
09 Nov 2009
Well, no wonder the lobbyists and some PACs are very interested.....some want to blame the environmentalists, but maybe there are people funding the environmentalists just to get it approved....like the BANKERS you mention.
Just like some banks buy and store oil and wait till the prices go up and sell at a profit, becoming another middleman before it gets to the consumer. (Shouldn't their be more regulation as to whom can hoard oil?)
Aren't derivatives going to have new regulations?
I guess that will give more jobs to actuaries...maybe a derivative Czar...who will oversea Cap and Trade, lol.....
I predict there won't be fast enough changes taking place to really affect any real climate change. Mother nature is more fragile than most people actually believe. People who sail the seas have a better understanding of how small this planet really is.
I mean, planes cause a great deal of the problem and airlines don't make profits as it is and are always getting an eventual bail out...or go bankrupt. How are THEY going to pay another cost?
I believe that the countries with the most money will do most of the polluting because they will be able to afford it...you aren't going to tell tribes people to stop burning forests for wood in order to survive. And you aren't going to get a homeless person to pay you taxes. Or a starving person. And how much will armies pay for all the polluting they do?
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like a scheme to me...just like how they are trying a progam to "replace wetlands" which are ruined by developers and "progress" without more thought to the land.
Cap and trade is another obstacle to business. Other types of regulation would probably be more beneficial.
Do these two attorneys for the EPA have a better idea?
Did I miss something?
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Kiara Posted 7:43 pm
09 Nov 2009
The EPA reaction seemed so insignificant compared to the message of the video.
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OrganicGeorge Posted 5:23 am
10 Nov 2009
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/feds-nemesis-exters-2-quadrillion-liquidity
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CM Hersh Posted 11:10 am
11 Nov 2009
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hank Posted 5:11 pm
13 Nov 2009
http://www.osc.gov/ha_fed.htm
---excerpt---
Permitted/Prohibited Activities for Employees Who May Participate in Partisan Political Activity
These federal and D.C. employees may-
* be candidates for public office in nonpartisan elections
* register and vote as they choose
* assist in voter registration drives
* express opinions about candidates and issues
* contribute money to political organizations
* attend political fundraising functions
* attend and be active at political rallies and meetings
* join and be an active member of a political party or club
* sign nominating petitions
* campaign for or against referendum questions, constitutional amendments, municipal ordinances
* campaign for or against candidates in partisan elections
* make campaign speeches for candidates in partisan elections
* distribute campaign literature in partisan elections
* hold office in political clubs or parties
These federal and D.C. employees may not-
* use of official authority or influence to affect the results of an elections
* solicit or discourage political activity of anyone with business before their agency
* solicit or receive political contributions (may be done in certain limited situations by federal labor or other employee organizations)
* be candidates for public office in partisan elections
* engage in political activity while:
o on duty
o in a government office
o wearing an official uniform
o using a government vehicle
* wear partisan political buttons on duty
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christophersj Posted 9:36 am
12 Nov 2009
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Ken Ward Posted 7:18 am
13 Nov 2009
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oracle2world Posted 9:01 pm
15 Nov 2009
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Alida Antonia Cornelius Posted 6:35 am
16 Nov 2009
Sort of like the "whistle blower" laws, which protects persons from speaking up. Is this video really any different?
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oracle2world Posted 7:50 am
16 Nov 2009
These two clowns are attorneys, have received ethics training up the wazoo over the years, and knew exactly what they were doing.
Since they are close to retirement age, I figure they just wanted to land some work afterwards and this was a good way to market themselves.
("Whistle blower" laws protect people who rat out the system about SPECIFIC wrongdoing. Not general policy type disagreements like this.)
All this government ethics stuff can be found at:
http://www.oge.gov/
Now with any other profession, folks might be more understanding. But lawyers (LAWYERS!) trying to weasal out of this one? Forget it. Lawyers make a living "encouraging" compliance with the law. And these two then proceeded to completely flout it.
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ShalomCtr Posted 7:09 am
16 Nov 2009
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