CA: Still shameful / Air board’s response to scandal is appalling (CARB 'sucks' as state suffers)

Beginning with two editorials in late December 2008, this editorial page repeatedly has criticized the California Air Resources Board for its headline-hunting decision to adopt unprecedentedly sweeping and costly diesel-emission rules at its meeting earlier that month. Soon after that meeting, we had confirmed that Hien Tran – lead author and coordinator of the study justifying the rules – lied about having a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California Davis.

Our subsequent reporting showed senior air board officials from Chairwoman Mary Nichols down knew of Tran’s academic fraud before the Dec. 12, 2008, vote but chose not to inform the public, the media or most of the board members who voted for the diesel rules.

The outrageousness of this deceit is finally being acknowledged. One of the board members who was kept in the dark – Fresno cardiologist John Telles – learned of the deception earlier this fall. Now Telles and another board member, San Diego County Supervisor Ron Roberts, are calling for suspension of the diesel rules.

But the reaction from the agency’s hierarchy and board members to this common-sense request has been obtuse to the extreme.

Chief Counsel Ellen M. Peter told Telles that the board officials’ failure to reveal the deception before the Dec. 12 vote didn’t amount to a violation of proper procedures.

In a letter he co-wrote that was published in the Union-Tribune, board member John Balmes – who was informed of Tran’s fraud by e-mail on Dec. 11, 2008, and failed to tell Telles and other colleagues about it – rejected all criticism of the air board for its actions in the Tran matter. But in an e-mail to Telles, he said “in retrospect” the Tran report should have been withdrawn – which can’t be reconciled with his public comments.

Nichols is worst of all. In an e-mail to Telles, she acknowledged Tran’s fraud was “illegal and unethical” and apologized for not disclosing it to the full board before the vote. But she characterized the matter as a “distraction” and a “stupid personnel problem” – not a real scandal.

It was, is and will continue to be a real scandal until the rules are suspended and a new study is done. It is worth remembering why the scandal ever came to light: because UCLA epidemiologist James E. Enstrom was so dismayed by the study’s omission of crucial evidence that he began looking into Tran’s background.

Enstrom needs to be given a chance to present the omitted evidence – and be taken seriously. He has been a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology since 1981. Tran? The Ph.D. he provided to his air board bosses when his UC Davis deceit emerged was from a diploma mill based at a Manhattan UPS store.

Yet Tran still works for the agency as a researcher. He was demoted, not fired. This speaks volumes about Mary Nichols’ air board. As long as your “research” promotes ever-more-costly regulations, you’re indispensable.

Here is alink to an article by Dr. Bill Wattenbuerg about the fraud that is CARB. CARB needs to die.

Dr. Willard H. (Bill) Wattenburg is a senior research scientist at the Research Foundation, California State University, Chico; and a scientific consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and many other institutions. He is a former nuclear weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; a former member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; and a former UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering. He was co-founder of Berkeley Scientific Laboratories with Dr. Donald Glaser (Nobel Prize, Physics, 1960). He is also the host of the very popular radio talk show, “The Open Line to the West Coast,” KGO Radio AM810, ABC Network, San Francisco (six hours per week since 1972, Saturday and Sunday nights 10pm to 1am). This is the most listened to night-time radio talk show in eleven western states in that time slot.

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Essay By Dr. Bill Wattenburg

The Biggest Professional Liars are on the Californiastate payroll. They are called CARB. Your state legislators are approving it. You, the victims, are being forced to pay the high salaries of these frauds while 8000 teachers were fired because your legislators gave CARB a billion dollars behind your back. Even the state attorney general turns his back on the biggest frauds against the working people.

By Bill Wattenburg, KGO Radio
DrBill.us
September 28, 2009

Read how Mary Nichols, head of CARB, the so-called California Air Resources Board, brags about fining businesses in California while covering up the past and present criminal behavior of the CARB agency. This is exactly like the Mafia bragging about its extortion of businesses in areas that government police forces can not or will not protect the citizens.

The real culprits are the legislators you elected in Sacramento. They approved everything. They can cancel any action by any state agency or bureaucracy. They can cancel the budget of any agency that is hurting the environment and/or the economy. There is no excuse whatsoever for them to allow CARB to tax and regulate people and businesses just to justify the $100,000 per year jobs of the CARB bureaucratic frauds on the state payroll – while two million California workers are out of work, no income at all for their families.

You must find the names of the state assembly person and the state senator who represents you in your home area. These politicians count on the fact that most people do not remember their names. That way, they can ignore you after they get to their plush offices in Sacramento — with a free car and credit card and a million dollar a year staff, all paid for by you taxpayers who are forgotten. The legislators who turn their backs on you spend their time with big money lobbyists and state bureaucracies that promise to put the legislators’ friends on the agency payrolls and help the politicians get re-elected.

Once you have their names, you must put up some signs that tell them what they must do to represent you. You must tell them that they lied to you when they promised to protect you and your interests after they got your vote. Simple signs like the following will get their attention:

Assemblyman Smith, you got our vote. Then you lied to us.
You gave CARB a billion dollars behind our backs — and then you fired 8000 teachers.
CARB is a fraud and so are you unless you kill that agency and rehire our teachers.

Put the name of your state senator in the next sign. Put these signs on your front lawn, in the window, on telephone poles and fences, in bumper stickers. Remember how the politicians put up their signs to get your vote at election time. You must do the same to let the public see their names again.

Go to the representative locater at killcarb.org and put in your zip code to find your local legislators and their addresses. There you can also see the documented history of the fraud agency CARB.

Remember, the politicians fear these public signs more than anything. They never expect the general public to see and remember their names on signs with something negative for which they are responsible. They never expect you to hold them responsible for anything after they get your vote. Try it, you’ll like it. You have every right to put up a sign on your property or car anytime you want. Even a simple handwritten one is very effective.

The politicians are running scared already because thousands of truckers in the state are putting signs like this on their trucks for all to see, every day. Some legislators are already telling CARB to delay their criminal regulations on diesel engines that will cost the state at least 25 billion dollars — total waste -— and another million jobs. But delay is not enough. They must kill this fraud agency once and for all. They must return the billion dollars wasted every year to the state education system and rehire the 8000 teachers who were fired for lack of the money that your deceiving politicians gave the cancerous CARB agency and their cesspool of environmental frauds.

Background on CARB:

Here are the biggest official liars on the state payroll. The CARB main mouthpiece, lawyer Mary Nichols, says that owners of cars and trucks are the biggest polluters. No, she and CARB are covering up the biggest polluters in the state and the country. These are the fossil fuel power plants that spew out more than a 100 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. And the amount is growing each year as the state must generate or buy more filthy coal and natural gas power each year to keep up with the growing population. She and the other enviro-frauds with power in the state (the Green Gestapo) do not want to reduce – or even mention — the power plant pollution. So, they concentrate on punishing the sheep, the ten million working folks who must commute to work and the trucking industry that sustains our economy.

Look at the fines that CARB brags about and imposes on people. Not a one is against a filthy power plant spewing out 3 to 8 million tons of pollution and CO2 into the air each year. And there are over 40 of these plants running at any time. They will not touch the big power companies that send millions in campaign contributions to the politicians in Sacramento — the legislators that promised to protect the working people before they were elected to office and given a free ride at taxpayer expense. The legislators turn their backs on the people and let the 1000 or more CARB bureaucrats collect whatever money they want to pay their salaries. All in the name of protecting the environment.

Keep in mind that these same CARB frauds, attorney Mary Nichols in particular, created the biggest pollution of the state for over ten years when they stupidly put the untested MTBE additive in the gasoline and forced the working people of California to pay over 20 billion dollars extra to poison themselves from 1996 to 2004. The California EPA became the California Environmental Pollution Agency.

Stupid CARB regulations like the MTBE that do nothing for the environment are the reason you pay $0.50 a gallon more for gasoline in California than the national average. Most CARB regulations only collect money to pay the salaries of the CARB frauds on the state payroll.

Where is the Attorney General of California? He is supposed to protect the citizens and prosecute polluters. He knows that a state agency just across the street committed the biggest crime against the environment in California in history, the MTBE poisoning of the state and ground water you are drinking. But he does not even investigate the very real possibility that they, CARB, are again defrauding the public that he is sworn to protect. Instead, the Attorney General brags that he is using his hundreds of lawyers on the state payroll to prosecute the little guys, small businesses and individuals who contribute less that 1% of what CARB calls pollution.

It seems that everyone but the Attorney General knows that a so-called top scientist on the CARB staff is a fraud. He did not get a PhD from UC Davis. He bought his degree from a mail order house. He is the one who justified the disastrous regulations against diesel engines and trucks in the state. Top scientists say he is wrong. There is no proven or even significant danger from diesel engine exhaust compared to many other much bigger sources of pollution that CARB refuses to acknowledge. But CARB is steaming ahead with their diesel engine regulations that will cripple the economy of California — just as CARB persisted with the MTBE in the gasoline for ten years in spite of warnings from good scientists that MTBE was itself a major pollutant and a poison.

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