Not long after being elected, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley established the 22-member Maryland Commission on Climate Change to recommend measures for the state to combat global warming. When the commission released a 61-page report last month recommending measures to cut greenhouse gases by 90 percent by 2050, O’Malley said; “The climate crisis is real, and while it threatens our shorelines today, its causes and symptoms threaten life on our planet in the generations ahead unless we act.”

That sounds serious, so we hope O’Malley would agree Maryland taxpayers have a right to know what he and other state officials are doing about any problem that threatens life on Earth, much less life in Maryland.

O’Malley should remind his Maryland environmental officials of the public’s right to know. They seem determined to conceal from Maryland taxpayers even the most basic details about what they are doing to confront this life-threatening problem. They’re doing it with an inter-locking directorate of Harrisburg, Pa.-based environmental advocacy groups funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other liberal foundations favoring draconian government policies against global warming.

Consider what happened last month when Red Maryland blogger Mark Newgent of Baltimore requested from the Maryland Department of the Environment copies of all documents in its possession regarding the Center for Climate Strategies, Enterprising Environmental Solutions, Inc., and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, the trio of Harrisburg, groups that help numerous state governments develop and implement environmental policies. Laramie Daniel, a public information liaison for the department, responded on Dec. 17, saying there were 3,700 such documents and that four staff hours would be required for copying them at a cost of approximately $1,381.40.

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But Daniel had a different answer for Paul Chesser, a North Carolina-based journalist who requested the same documents. In an Oct. 5, 2007, letter, Daniel claimed no such documents existed, except a few internal communications that were withheld. There are no contracts, budgets, invoices, purchase orders, bills or receipts concerning any of the three organizations, Daniel said. Then on Dec. 12, MDE’s George Atburn told Chesser his request had been revisited and officials had decided to give him 11 pages of previously withheld documents, including extensive e-mail and draft proposals last summer between Maryland and CCS officials about the latter’s role in developing recommendations reflected in the O’Malley commission’s December report.

The obvious question here is why MDE officials can find 3,700 pages of documents concerning CCS, EESI and PEC in December but only a handful in October? Since O’Malley describes the problem the Pennsylvania trio specializes in as a life-and-death matter for Marylanders and none of the dozen other states in which the trio has done business have withheld reams of documents, why is Maryland making it so difficult to get the facts?