Bring Up a Petition, Then Rule on It

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on March 11, 2010

in Blog

Imagine lobbyists for the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy controlled an EPA rulemaking panel that would decide whether a petition to cap greenhouse gas emissions sponsored by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership — an alliance that includes all three aforementioned environoia groups — would become law. Wouldn’t every activist with a cause love to have such an arrangement?

The equivalent of that is what’s transpiring in New Mexico, where the state Environmental Improvement Board is considering a rule that would cap CO2 emissions at 25 percent of 1990 levels. As New Mexico Watchdog reporter Jim Scarantino has written in a series of articles, the majority of EIB members — including (and especially) its chairman, Gregory Green — have conflicts of interest because they represent (and are paid by) activist groups who jointly brought the petition before the EIB.

Last week the Rio Grande Foundation’s Paul Gessing (NM Watchdog is a project of the Albuquerque-based conservative think tank) testified before the EIB and challenged members Green, Gay Dillingham and James Gollin to recuse themselves from hearing the petition:

Gessing told the EIB he that the very integrity of the process, aside from the merits of the issue, was undermined because “there was more than a reasonable basis to question the impartiality and fairness” of these members of the EIB in considering this petition. Those questions arise from financial and employment ties between Green and the petitioner New Energy Economy and his representation as a lobbyist on energy and environmental issues for four parties to the NEE peitition who have hired him through the Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy. Gollin and Dillingham are, respectively, an officer and director of organizations that are allied with NEE in promoting the very same emissions cap they are being asked to impose upon New Mexico  as members of the EIB.

And just look at the faces (video)of Green, Dillingham and Gollin as Gessing criticizes their oversight of this dog-and-pony show.

Adding insult to injury, Green’s group stacked their literature at a table where members of the public were required to sign in for the hearing. The literature promoted a lunch for petition supporters paid for by Green’s New Energy Economy. Afterward, in the comments section of Scarantino’s report, Green made a feeble effort to show fairness by offering to let Rio Grande put materials out for public consumption.

Bob R Geologist, Tucson, AZ March 30, 2010 at 3:37 am

Thanks to Climategate, we have begun to stem the veritable tide of ignorance our green fanatics foisted on a naive populace with dire threats of runaway warming. They never bothered to study the books on the Earth’s climate history in their overbearing egotism that they could force world opinion to do their bidding. Their largest and most expensive ploy was to lure enough venal climate scientists to give credence to their shoddy hypothesis (AGW). What they forgot, there were thousands of retired scientists who, like myself, kept up with their science, all because it was their hold on life, their raison d’etre. The implications of the Kyoto Protocols hit me like a ton of bricks it was so bizarre. I’m sure the rest of my 30,000+ skeptical brethern, still active in their respective disciplines, felt something of the sort. I am satisfied that the true science is heavily weighted with the skeptic point of view and that CEI’s summation of the situation in a report dated last Fall (’09) is that “no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made CO2 has a significant effect on the global climate.”

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