EPA censors employees' YouTube video

November 10, 10:44 AMEnergy ExaminerJohn Guerrerio

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Critics of cap-and-trade claim it won't restrict greenhouse gas emissions enough.

Wikipedia Commons; Dori

Two EPA employees from the San Francisco Regional Office with more than 20 years of experience each have begun speaking out against the Obama Administration's and the EPA's cap-and-trade initiative in the American Clean Energy and Security Act currently being worked on in Congress.

The video is called The Huge Mistake, and shortly after being posted on YouTube, the EPA ordered the employees to take the video down.  They made efforts to remove the video, but claims of censorship heightened awareness of the video and, as of today, the video still remains available through YouTube services.

Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, authors of the video, also wrote an opinion piece called The cap-and-trade mirage to go along with their video, and it was published in The Washington Post on October 31.  While the EPA initially approved the couple's request to post their video on YouTube, once the OpEd piece was published in WaPo, the EPA ordered the couple to remove the video claiming it violated agency policy.

Williams and Zabel make the claim that "the House and Senate climate bills are not the first step in the right direction; they would give away valuable rights in cap-and-trade permits and create a trillion dollar carbon offsets market that will not lead to needed reductions".

The EPA couple are not the first people to criticize the climate bill that passed the House and the other being crafted in the Senate.  The WSJ, back in August, highlighted Thomas Crocker's and John Dale's (cap-and-trade's original creators) criticism of large scale commercialization of the concept fleshed out in their thesis in the 1960s. (WSJ)

Determining the price of carbon offsets requires estimates of climate change impacts on GDP in the future, which is a highly uncertain process.  Changing the regulatory grip on emissions based upon market uncertainties, critics claim, simply creates a giant arena of speculation where trillions of dollars are traded around like Casino Coins.  Lack of stability in the cap-and-trade program does not give investors the confidence they need in order to begin pouring investment into the clean energy marketplace.

In addition, current versions of the climate bills in Congress hand out a significant number of permits to existing companies currently responsible for vast portions of annual domestic greenhouse gas emissions.  Handing out permits for free and then trading them in an open market does not reduce overall emissions; "this allows your local polluter to merely buy credits elsewhere and continue polluting while passing his costs on to you".

EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton said, "EPA has nearly 18,000 employees and all of them are free to, and many do, publicly express their views on issues of the day.  The only requirement is that employees adhere to the government’s ethical regulations, which are in place to ensure that EPA and other agencies maintain the highest possible ethical standards at all times". (WaPo)