The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental communication accounts, which a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA requests. This “cloud” serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal has a long piece about the prospect of using the state to move part of the U.S. transportation fleet from oil-derived fuels to natural gas. It gives prominent voice to the massive public affairs campaign of T. Boone Pickens, undertaken in the apparent quest for a legacy, locking in subsidized billions for his natural gas fortune as a swansong to a prosperous career.

This campaign takes the form of a bill embraced by ostensible fiscal hawks, causing an uproar and enabling the media to describe the Republicans ‘circular firing squad’, of a base taking umbrage at Members abandoning their pledges of fiscal sobriety at the drop of a billionaire’s phone call. Well played, gentlemen.

The vehicle was not Pickens’ first choice. His first choice was a windmill mandate, transparently pushed by a handful of gas interests, including Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, to put a green hat on their efforts to use the state to displace coal’s market (one of McClendon’s group’s first television ads stated up front, “more wind means more gas”: windmills don’t work that often, so they need ‘backup’ to run wastefully all the time, cycling up and down, and for various reasons inevitably this means gas-fired electricity).

Coal was difficult to budge, what with centuries of it domestically, so some gas folks have been helping the greens’ war against coal for about two decades. This is their latest foray.

And, astroturfers, please hold the mail. I happened to be in the room in 1997 with the American Gas Association, BP, and Enron as they worked with green pressure groups, as radical as the Union of Concerned Scientists as well as more mainstream, anti-coal activists like NRDC, to get a global warming treaty and a domestic cap-and-trade scheme. I couldn’t believe my ears and said so, which in a matter of weeks led to us parting ways.

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On Wednesday night the Competitive Enterprise Institute, through its outside counsel Gibson Dunn, filed its brief arguing against NASA’s rather scattershot and contradictory effort to dismiss our lawsuit requesting certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting — temporarily — that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy)  cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

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The alarmists’ reaction to CEI’s Notice of Intent to Sue NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for withholding data–now for nigh on two years–has been particularly shrill, as regards my inquiry into the clearance and other deliberations over the non-official activities for the nasty, deceptive, third-party advocacy blog RealClimate.org by one GISS spokesman Gavin Schmidt on official, taxpayer-funded time.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists’ reaction in the current “ClimateGate” context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what’s inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

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