The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”

But as I pointed out yesterday on this site, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?

Greenpeace and Grijalva have got the wrong target in their sites. The inquisition they propose might actually have some merit if directed at one of their heroes: Dr. James Hansen of NASA. Hansen has received upwards of $1.6 million in outside income. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that most or all of that income was for teaching, writing, and speaking on matters “related to” his “official duties.”

My colleague Chris Horner laid out the juicy details last November in a column posted on Watts Up With That. In “Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income,” Chris argued that Hansen gets substantial outside income for activities related to his official duties and does not always comply with federal financial disclosure regulations:

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.

This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee.

There’s more in Chris’s post, but you get the drift.

Now, I wondered whether Hansen, an employee of NASA, an independent agency, is subject to the same outside compensation rules as Goklany, an employee of an Executive Agency. The answer is yes. NASA’s guidelines on “outside employment” state that ”Employees should refer generally to the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, 5 CFR Part 2635,” and must comply with Subpart H.

CFR Part 2365, Subpart H bars an employee from receiving compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing “that relates to the employee’s official duties.” Quite sensibly, though, the employee may receive compensation for speaking, teaching, or writing not related to his official duties:

Note: Section 2635.807(a)(2)(i)(E) does not preclude an employee, other than a covered noncareer employee, from receiving compensation for teaching, speaking or writing on a subject within the employee’s discipline or inherent area of expertise based on his educational background or experience even though the teaching, speaking or writing deals generally with a subject within the agency’s areas of responsibility.

This language seems to fit Goklany to a tee. The proposed chapter for Heartland on climate economics and policy is within Goklany’s discipline and area of expertise but it is not related to his official duties.

Can anyone with a straight face say the same about Hansen? How could Hansen’s teaching, speaking, and writing about climate change not be related to his official duties? How then could the outside income he has received for those activities not be unlawful?

Rep. Grijalva’s demand for a House Resources Committee “hearing” on Goklany is preposterous. A letter of inquiry would suffice even if there were evidence of improper conduct, which there is not.

My unsolicited advice to Committee Chair Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) is to politely reject Grijalva’s request but also to ask Grijalva, just for the record, whether he and Greenpeace think the Committee should investigate James Hansen’s million dollar-plus outside income.

Yesterday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested that the House Resources Committee investigate whether Department of Interior employee Indur Goklany accepted “illegal outside payments” from the Heartland Institute, and “what confidential information Goklany may have shared with Heartland officials in the course of negotiating his payment agreements.”

Grijalva made this request in a letter to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The alleged ‘issue’ arose because one of the stolen Heartland documents, the Institute’s 2012 budget, proposes to pay Goklany $1,000/m to write a chapter on economics and policy for a forthcoming book, Climate Change Reconsidered: 2012 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Grijalva, citing a letter from Greenpeace to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, claims federal employees are not allowed to take payment from outside organizations, particularly for “teaching, speaking and writing that relates to [their] official duties.”

I fully understand why Greenpeace and Grijalva want to harass and silence Goklany. Goklany is one of a handful of indispensable thought leaders in the climate policy debate.  He has demonstrated, for example, that, largely because of mankind’s utilization of fossil fuels, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by a remarkable 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. He has also demonstrated that, even assuming worst-case impacts from the UN IPCC’s high-end warming scenario, developing countries in 2100 are projected to be much richer than developed countries are today. Nobody takes the hot air out of climate hype like Indur Goklany! So naturally, Greenpeace guttersnipes want to besmirch and muzzle him.

Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way from the get-go. There are absolutely no grounds for Grijalva to investigate whether Goklany “may have shared” “confidential information” with Heartland. To make a charge like that, you’ve got to show probable cause, or at least some evidence. The mere speculative possibility that something might have happened does not authorize politicians to demand proof that it didn’t happen — not in a free country, anyway. Even Joe McCarthy pretended to have evidence for the allegations he made.

Think tanks often commission books, chapters, or papers from outside experts. If the sloths at Greenpeace and Grijalva’s office made the least effort, they would see that Goklany’s prolific scholarship on climate change relies exclusively on peer-reviewed, open-source literature.

Now let’s consider the alleged ban on outside payments for teaching, writing, and speaking. Here’s the relevant portion of the Justice Department’s Federal Employee Ethics Handbook:

An employee may not receive compensation — including travel expenses for transportation and lodging — from any source other than the Government for teaching, speaking or writing that relates to the employee’s official duties. For most employees, teaching, speaking, or writing is considered “related to official duties” if–

• The activity is part of the employee’s official duties;
• The invitation to teach, speak, or write is extended primarily because of the employee’s official position;
• The invitation or the offer of compensation is extended by a person whose interests may be affected substantially by the employee’s performance of his official duties;
• The activity draws substantially on nonpublic information; or
• The subject of the activity deals in significant part with agency programs, operations or policies or with the employee’s current or recent assignments.

Let’s take each bullet in turn. (1) To my knowledge, writing on climate economics and policy is not “part of” Goklany’s “official duties” at Interior. (2) Heartland invited Goklany to write a chapter on climate economics and policy because of his expertise, not “primarily because” of his “official position.” (3) Heartland’s “interests” are not “affected substantially” by Goklany’s “performance of his official duties.” (4) Goklany’s chapter would be based on peer-reviewed and open-source literature, not “nonpublic information.” (5) The proposed chapter presumably would not discuss Interior Department “programs, operations or policies.”

It may surprise Rep. Grijalva, but some experts who work in federal agencies also have careers as independent scholars. For decades, Goklany has written books and articles on weekends, at night, and during sabbaticals. His Web site, Goklany.Org, lists his numerous publications.

The Cato Institute published three of Goklany’s books: The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (2007), The Precautionary Principle: An Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment (2001), and Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution (1999). Since most people in America – including most authors — get paid something for their labors, I assume  Cato paid Goklany honoraria to write those books.

Do Greenpeace and Grijalva suppose that Goklany hid the books from Interior, or that Interior was too dim or lazy to find out that Cato had published them? Knowing Goklany, I would be shocked if he did not clear with higher ups whatever financial arrangements he negotiated with Cato. Ditto for anything he writes for Heartland.

Gleick did not need to steal Heartland documents for Greenpeace to discover Goklany’s “link” to Heartland. Take a look at Heartland’s Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the prequel to the 2012 book project discussed in the purloined budget document. Appendix 2 (pp. 415-516) lists Goklany as one of eight contributing authors.

Heartland has distributed thousands of hard copies of the 2011 Interim Report and makes the book available for free download on three different Web sites (here, here, and here). Heartland will similarly publicize the heck out of the 2012 report to which Goklany may be a contributor. There is simply no “secret” here meriting a congressional probe.

So what’s it all about? Grijalva and Greenpeace are desperate to find some redeeming social value in Peter Gleick’s professional meltdown. They want to harass somebody, anybody, connected with Heartland. They want to divert attention from the stupendous embarrassment that Gleick has become for the self-anointed “consensus of scientists.” They want to suppress independent thought in federal agencies too prone already to the maladies of group-think and political correctness.

Bully tactics are more likely to turn people off than win hearts and minds. Like Gleick and the Climategate schemers, Greenpeace and Grijalva are their own worst enemies.