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July 27, 2011 | Policy Brief by PAUL CHESSER, MARK NEWGENT
The Great Frack Attack: The War on Natural Gas
Much attention has been paid to the efforts of gas companies to influence the political debate through campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. But anti-drilling activists—while claiming gas companies use their vast financial resources to weaken regulatory structures and silence poorly funded environmental groups—influence politicians through their own lobbying efforts and by spreading myths about drilling. Among the myths alleged about "Big Gas" is that drillers are flocking to Pennsylvania's rich Marcellus Shale reserves, engaging in dangerous and highly polluting drilling activities, and shirking responsibility for damages while successfully avoiding paying taxes.
December 30, 2010 | Commentary by PAUL CHESSER
Gov., Legislature Should Repeal Costly Renewables Mandates
A lot can be spun from the results of the Nov. 2 elections, but one fact is uncontrovertible: Pennsylvanians are sick of centrally planned, highly regulated, gimmick-driven economic policy. It hasn't worked, and now they want results.
October 27, 2010 | Commentary by PAUL CHESSER
Never Enough Green for Renewable Energy
According to Pennsylvania's Public Utilities Commission, the annual cost of ownership for solar energy per kilowatt-hour is over 700% more than the cost of coal, and wind energy is almost 23% more expensive than coal. Meanwhile, state government provides more than $20 million annually for grants to alternative energy projects, and in 2008, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, signed into law another mandate for an additional $650 million to be given to "green" schemes. Try paying those higher utility and tax bills while fighting to keep your job.
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AUGUST 27, 2011
Hiding the Decline of Academic and Scientific Transparency
That's what University of Virginia continues to do, as my colleague at American Tradition Institute Chris Horner explains today in Washington Examiner. Earlier this week UVA -- as required by a court order -- delivered records relating to Climategate "Hockey Stick" chart creator Michael Mann (now at Penn State) that ATI asked for in January under a Freedom of Information Act request. Except the records provided -- less than half of the 9,000 or so records that UVA says are responsive to our request -- were of minimal relevance to Mann's research.
UVA has said it will claim exemptions to protect records of a "proprietary nature," which is irrelevant here under Virginia's FOIA law because all the research Mann did has been published, and therefore public. Obviously missing from the fluffy document dump this week were the already-publicized Climategate emails between Mann, East Anglia pals, and other alarmists. As Chris explains:
ClimateGate emails sent or received by Mann's UVa email address include certain now-notorious, often nasty missives, many highly questionable from a legal or ethics perspective and most reflecting wagon-circling by alarmists discussing how to defeat substantive challenge and even requests for transparency involving an already published paper.
It is reasonable to surmise that these are among the 9,000 pages UVa finally identified as responsive to ATI. If so, each of them is being withheld on the remarkable claim that they are "Data, records or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or for faculty ... in the conduct of or as a result of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues." Really.
Excerpts of apparently scholarly research of commercial intent and value presumably include the ClimateGate gems "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!", and one gleefully noting the death of a skeptic who had dared correspond with them.
This is the sort of Top Secret "proprietary" emails UVa will risk fortune, reputation and sanction to keep from producing. A UVa official informed us on no less than three occasions that the school was, in effect, ignoring the law's mandate to interpret exemptions narrowly.
Mann told Science magazine this week that UVA wasn't providing anything to ATI other than "boilerplate:"
"U.Va has not turned over emails related to discussions of research, unpublished manuscripts, private discussions between scientists about science, etc.,--i.e., any of the materials that are exempt from release by state law," Mann wrote in an e-mail message. "U.Va has simply turned over the non-exempt emails, and many of these were turned over to ATI months ago."
Obviously Mann is not a lawyer, as there is no exemption in Virginia's FOIA for "private discussions between scientists about science" under taxpayer-funded research and institutions.
As we expected, we will have to wait another month until UVA shows the records that they claim are exempt to Horner and to our Law Center director David Schnare, under a protective order, and then they will hash out their dispute over the remaining documents in front of a judge, who will make the final call as to their public release. As UVA conspirator Michael Halpern of Union of Concerned Scientists told the Washington Post, "The real test will be the second phase."
posted by PAUL CHESSER | 04:07 PM | 0 comment
MAY 25, 2011
Court Orders U. of Virginia to Produce Michael Mann Documents
As I mentioned last week, the American Tradition Institute's Environmental Law Center took the University of Virginia to court yesterday in Prince William County, Va., to ask a judge to force the release of documents of Climategate scientist Michael Mann, from his tenure there years ago. He's now at Penn State. We asked for the UVA records more than four months ago. Our court hearing was yesterday.
As you will see in this excerpt from our press release today, UVA has been less than cooperative:
Under FOIA the University was required to produce the documents within five days of its receipt of payment for "accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching" for the documents. Alternatively they could have entered into an agreement with ATI on when they would supply the documents, or they could have gone to court to ask for more time. They did none of the above. Instead they promised to provide some of the documents "shortly" on April 6; then specifically on May 6, 2011; and always stated they would get to the others later on. They did none of this either, so ATI went to court to compel production and compliance with the law.
But once we turned up the pressure...
ATI finally received the first approximately 20 percent of the 9,000 pages of documents that UVA says are responsive to ATI's request and that it possesses, only after ATI filed its petition, and two working days before the judicial hearing. Most of what ATI received in this seemingly hurried production, which was more focused on showing volume than content, were ads for Halloween costumes, public news releases from lay and scientific journals, and a few emails that were printed in computer code so as to be unintelligible in that form. Despite this product of (according to the University) 75 hours of review and more than four months, the University stopped work on producing anything further.
As our director of litigation Chris Horner has said, "our filing suit helped clarify the University's thinking," so they dumped a pile of mostly useless documents on us "to show volume if not actual cooperation," to "look less bad to a court." This was all while they tried to charge ATI $8,500 -- an unsupportable sum -- to produce the documents, of which we paid nearly half, yet UVA still delayed and withheld. We are challenging that also and a judge is due to render a decision on June 15.
As for yesterday, the judge issued two orders: one for the University to produce the documents within 90 days in electronic form, as we requested, instead of the document dump they appeared to be prepared to make; and the other a protective order which allows Horner and our Law Center director, David Schnare, to review the records that UVA wants to claim as exempt and therefore keep from the view of the public. Horner and Schnare will be able to then argue before a judge later this year why Virginia's Freedom of Information Act does not allow the exemptions (such as "academic freedom" and "proprietary research") that UVA is likely to claim.
posted by PAUL CHESSER | 11:51 AM | 0 comment
MAY 18, 2011
We Took U. of Virginia to Court Over Michael Mann's Records
We (American Tradition Institute's Environmental Law Center) figured four-plus months and $4,000 was enough to give the University of Virginia to start producing the records we requested that pertain to their former Climategate scientist Michael Mann -- you know, Mr. Transparency who is now at Penn State -- so on Monday we asked a judge to force the issue:
Since (Jan. 6) UVA officials have demanded an unjustified and unsupportable sum of $8,500 from ATI to produce the documents, despite its admission that it knows precisely where the records exist on a specific University computer server. Still, ATI made a down payment of $2,000 for UVA to begin its search and delivery of Mann's records - and also a second payment, for a total paid of $4,000.00 - but University officials still have not provided any documents, nor offered a schedule of its intentions to respond to ATI's information request....
ATI has requested the same records under Virginia's FOIA law. UVA has informed ATI it might withhold many of the records sought by ATI under a "proprietary research" exclusion in the law. However, that exemption only applies to research that "has not been publicly released, published, copyrighted or patented" and is otherwise of actual value to UVA. Clearly that exception does not apply to Dr. Mann's emails a la ClimateGate, sought in ATI's request, or to his research records given the work in question has been in the public domain for over a decade, was published in academic journals Nature and Geophysical Research Letters, by the IPCC, and elsewhere.
UVA has resisted a previous request by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli under the state's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act for the same records, with the help of $500,000 from private, anonymous donors (so the University says). Also, leftist groups including People for the American Way, ACLU-Virginia, Union of Concerned Scientists, and American Association of University Professors have pleaded with UVA to withhold Mann's records for reasons of "academic freedom" -- you know, similar to the illegitimate authority of "bureaucratic freedom" so often cited by other government institutions as an excuse to keep documents under wraps.
We hope to hear about a court date by Friday.
posted by PAUL CHESSER | 11:34 AM | 0 comment
