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Alan Carlin (born 1937), is an American economist specializing in cost-benefit analysis and the economics of global climate change control. [1]
Carlin earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.
Carlin worked as an economist at the Rand Corporation from 1963 to 1971. [2] From 1971 to 1974, Carlin was director of the Implementation Research Division of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He was a Senior Operations Research Analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), [3] from 1974 to 2010. During this period Carlin "carried out or supervised over a hundred policy-related studies on climate change, pollutant assessment, energy economics and development, environmental economics, transportation economics, benefit-cost analysis, and economic development." [4] He lists 39 publications he personally prepared. [5] In 2010, Carlin retired from his work as a Senior Operations Research Analyst at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). [3]
In the late 1960s Carlin's efforts together with the Sierra Club in presenting economic arguments against the two proposed dams in the Grand Canyon of Arizona resulted in those dams not being built. From 1970 to 1971 was Chairman of the Sierra Club's second largest Angeles Chapter. He received the Chapter's Weldon Heald award for conservation work.
Carlin is best known for a controversy that arose in June 2009, over the alleged suppression of a report Carlin and a coworker wrote opposing the EPA's Proposed Endangerment Finding for greenhouse gases.
In June 2009, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C. based think tank, and Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) claimed that the EPA had suppressed a report authored by Alan Carlin, that cast doubt on the existence of global warming and the need to regulate CO
2 emissions. Senator Inhofe wrote a letter to the EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, requesting that the agency reopen this matter and called for a congressional investigation of the suppression. [6] [7] The EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy, responded: "Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. . . . The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding. Additionally, his manager has allowed his general views on the subject of climate change to be heard and considered inside and outside the EPA and presented at conferences and at an agency seminar. And this individual was granted a request to join a committee that organizes an ongoing climate seminar series, open to both agency and outside experts, where he has been able to invite speakers with a full range of views on climate science." [8]
Internal e-mails related to the alleged suppression of Carlin's report were released under the Freedom of Information Act. [9] In them, Carlin, was discouraged by his superior at EPA, Al McGartland, "from filing comments on the proposed finding and told ... that whatever he submitted was not likely to affect the final report, suggesting to some that the decision had already been made by early March 2009. After receiving Carlin’s comments, McGartland told him that he would not forward them to the office preparing the final report. 'The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round,' he wrote on March 17. '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.' A few minutes later, he instructed Carlin to 'move on to other issues and subjects.' He also told Carlin not to discuss climate change with anyone outside his immediate office." [10] Carlin also acknowledged in the article that his report had been produced under short deadline and, as critics have said since, was not fully or cleanly sourced, and there was no restriction on his contact with the media. Andy was quoted as calling "the accusation that Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons 'ridiculous.' 'There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,' Andy said in an e-mail response to questions. 'This administration has always welcomed varying scientific points of view, and we received much of it over this process.'" No further Congressional action was reported, in the September report. [10]
Carlin appeared on the Glenn Beck Show on July 1, 2009, and stated that U.N. models anticipated an increase in global temperatures, but actual temperatures, according to the figures Carlin presented, had decreased between 2002 and 2008. [11]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. The order establishing the EPA was ratified by committee hearings in the House and Senate.
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is the primary law in the United States for protecting and conserving imperiled species. Designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a "consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation", the ESA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 28, 1973. The Supreme Court of the United States described it as "the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation". The purposes of the ESA are two-fold: to prevent extinction and to recover species to the point where the law's protections are not needed. It therefore "protect[s] species and the ecosystems upon which they depend" through different mechanisms. For example, section 4 requires the agencies overseeing the Act to designate imperiled species as threatened or endangered. Section 9 prohibits unlawful ‘take,’ of such species, which means to "harass, harm, hunt..." Section 7 directs federal agencies to use their authorities to help conserve listed species. The Act also serves as the enacting legislation to carry out the provisions outlined in The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The Supreme Court found that "the plain intent of Congress in enacting" the ESA "was to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost." The Act is administered by two federal agencies, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). FWS and NMFS have been delegated by the Act with the authority to promulgate any rules and guidelines within the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) to implement its provisions.
An environmental impact statement (EIS), under United States environmental law, is a document required by the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for certain actions "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment". An EIS is a tool for decision making. It describes the positive and negative environmental effects of a proposed action, and it usually also lists one or more alternative actions that may be chosen instead of the action described in the EIS. One of the primary authors of the act is Lynton K. Caldwell.
Myron Ebell is an American climate change denier who served as the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), an American libertarian advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. He was also chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a politically conservative group formed in 1997 focused on "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis". In September 2016, Ebell was appointed by then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to lead his transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
1,1,1,2,3,3,3-Heptafluoropropane, also called heptafluoropropane, HFC-227ea, HFC-227 or FM-200, as well as apaflurane (INN), is a colourless, odourless gaseous halocarbon commonly used as a gaseous fire suppression agent.
Lisa Perez Jackson is an American chemical engineer who served as the administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2009 to 2013. She was the first African American to hold that position.
The Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) was the program responsible for coordinating and integrating research on global warming by U.S. government agencies from February 2002 to June 2009. Toward the end of that period, CCSP issued 21 separate climate assessment reports that addressed climate observations, changes in the atmosphere, expected climate change, impacts and adaptation, and risk management issues. Shortly after President Obama took office, the program's name was changed to U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) which was also the program's name before 2002. Nevertheless, the Obama Administration generally embraced the CCSP products as sound science providing a basis for climate policy. Because those reports were mostly issued after the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in some cases focused specifically on the United States, they were generally viewed within the United States as having an importance and scientific credibility comparable to the IPCC assessments for the first few years of the Obama Administration.
Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), is a 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court case in which Massachusetts, along with eleven other states and several cities of the United States, represented by James Milkey, brought suit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) represented by Gregory G. Garre to force the federal agency to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) that pollute the environment and contribute to climate change.
Edward Scott Pruitt is an American attorney, lobbyist and Republican politician from the state of Oklahoma. He served as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from February 17, 2017, to July 9, 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, resigning while under at least 14 federal investigations. Pruitt denies the scientific consensus on climate change.
Susan Elaine Dudley is an American academic who served as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Office of Management and Budget in the administration of George W. Bush. As such, Dudley was the top regulatory official at the White House.
The environmental policy of the United States is a federal governmental action to regulate activities that have an environmental impact in the United States. The goal of environmental policy is to protect the environment for future generations while interfering as little as possible with the efficiency of commerce or the liberty of the people and to limit inequity in who is burdened with environmental costs. As his first official act bringing in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon signed the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law on New Years Day, 1970. Also in the same year, America began celebrating Earth Day, which has been called "the big bang of U.S. environmental politics, launching the country on a sweeping social learning curve about ecological management never before experienced or attempted in any other nation." NEPA established a comprehensive US national environmental policy and created the requirement to prepare an environmental impact statement for “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the environment.” Author and consultant Charles H. Eccleston has called NEPA the world's “environmental Magna Carta”.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The climate change policy of the United States has major impacts on global climate change and global climate change mitigation. This is because the United States is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world after China, and is among the countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person in the world. In total, the United States has emitted over a trillion metric tons of greenhouse gasses, more than any country in the world.
Climatic Research Unit documents including thousands of e-mails and other computer files were stolen from a server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in a hacking incident in November 2009. The documents were redistributed first through several blogs of global warming deniers, who alleged that the documents indicated misconduct by leading climate scientists. A series of investigations rejected these allegations, while concluding that CRU scientists should have been more open with distributing data and methods on request. Precisely six committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.
Pentafluoroethane is a fluorocarbon with the formula CF3CHF2. Pentafluoroethane is currently used as a refrigerant (known as R-125) and also used as a fire suppression agent in fire suppression systems.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began regulating greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act from mobile and stationary sources of air pollution for the first time on January 2, 2011. Standards for mobile sources have been established pursuant to Section 202 of the CAA, and GHGs from stationary sources are currently controlled under the authority of Part C of Title I of the Act. The basis for regulations was upheld in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in June 2012.
Energy Tax Prevention Act, also known as H.R. 910, was a 2011 bill in the United States House of Representatives to prohibit the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gases to address climate change. On April 7, 2011, the bill passed the House by a vote of 255 to 172. The bill died in January 2013 with the ending of the Congressional session.
The Clean Power Plan was an Obama administration policy aimed at combating anthropogenic climate change that was first proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in June 2014. The final version of the plan was unveiled by President Barack Obama on August 3, 2015. Each state was assigned an individual goal for reducing carbon emissions, which could be accomplished how they saw fit, but with the possibility of the EPA stepping in if the state refused to submit a plan. If every state met its target, the plan was projected to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation 32% by 2030, relative to 2005 levels, as well as achieving various health benefits due to reduced air pollution.
The environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration represented a shift from the policy priorities and goals of the preceding Barack Obama administration. Where President Obama's environmental agenda prioritized the reduction of carbon emissions through the use of renewable energy with the goal of conserving the environment for future generations, the Trump administration policy was for the US to attain energy independence based on fossil fuel use and to rescind many environmental regulations. By the end of Trump's term, his administration had rolled back 98 environmental rules and regulations, leaving an additional 14 rollbacks still in progress. As of early 2021, the Biden administration was making a public accounting of regulatory decisions under the Trump administration that had been influenced by politics rather than science.
Andrew R. Wheeler is an American attorney who served as the 15th administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2019 to 2021. He served as the deputy administrator from April to July 2018, and served as the acting administrator from July 2018 to February 2019. He has been a senior advisor to Governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin since March 2022. He previously worked in the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, representing coal magnate Robert E. Murray and lobbying against the Obama Administration's environmental regulations. Wheeler served as chief counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and to the chairman U.S. senator James Inhofe, prominent for his rejection of climate change. Wheeler is a critic of limits on greenhouse gas emissions and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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