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Environment & Energy Daily - Censorship Issue Finds New Venue this Week in Science Panel
March 26, 2007
by Lauren Morello
Congressional attention to allegations of scientific censorship continues this week with a House Science and Technology Committee hearing on whether the Bush administration has altered or suppressed the work of federal scientists.
The issue has become a major focus for Democrats, with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee aggressively looking into reported censorship of climate documents by White House officials and the Senate Commerce Committee investigating similar allegations within the U.S. Climate Change Science program, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But while those earlier hearings focused on the work of federal climatologists, the House Science Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee will take a broader look at its Thursday hearing, Democratic aides said. The wider focus is in line with the science panel's jurisdiction over all federal non-defense research and development activities, they said.
The hearing comes weeks after the subcommittee's chairman, Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), and Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) sent letters to 11 federal agencies and departments for more information on the policies that govern interaction between their scientists and the media. Recent media reports that Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and other employees may not discuss climate change, sea ice or polar bears unless designated to do so by the agency spurred the lawmakers' request, they said in the letters (E&E Daily, March 16).
While the FWS reports are likely to surface at Thursday's hearing, also guiding the discussion will be a new report from the Government Accountability Project that details incidents of scientific suppression across several federal agencies. The document, to be released at the hearing Thursday, is a follow-up to a report GAP released last month with the Union of Concerned Scientists that examined reported Bush administration interference in climate science and included a survey of government climatologists.
"This is kind of a extension of that," said GAP spokesman Dylan Blaylock. "We worked with UCS on [the first] report, and they took some of our language and some of our results, but not all of them." GAP attorney Tarek Maassarani will testify at the hearing.
Also testifying will be Harvard professor James McCarthy, a board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. In addition to its report with GAP last month on alleged suppression of federal climate science, UCS released a separate report in January that it says details disinformation tactics and media strategy used by Exxon Mobil Corp. "to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue."
The third witness, Sheldon Rampton, represents the group SourceWatch. A project of the Center for Media and Democracy, SourceWatch attempts to track ties between scientific experts, public relations firms and industry.
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