Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy yesterday appointed a top staffer with the environmental activist group Union of Concerned Scientists to serve as the agency’s top objective referee on scientific integrity issues. McCarthy’s selection of Francesca Grifo raises troubling concerns about EPA rushing headlong into anti-science environmental activism.
Grifo led so-called scientific integrity efforts at the Union of Concerned Scientists. While Grifo led such efforts, the UCS attempted to suppress scientific democracy and dissent, expressing outrage that a Congressman who is skeptical of the UCS’ asserted global warming crisis was allowed to be a member of the House Science Committee.
The UCS “Sound Science Initiative” also protests the “inundation of Capitol Hill with skeptics messages” and “conservative research institutions.”
The UCS Sound Science Initiative also claims a petition statement signed by more than 31,000 scientists stating humans are not causing a global warming crisis is “non-scientific” because it is allegedly motivated by certain “value positions.” Apparently, UCS believes there is so little room for disagreeing with its environmental activism that any scientists who publish contradictory papers or sign contradictory petition statements must be motivated by external values and are therefore unscientific. This, coming from a political activist group of leftist scientists who called for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament in the face of Soviet aggression during the Cold War.
The UCS Sound Science Initiative also attacks Ph.D. scientists who present peer-reviewed studies contradicting global warming alarmism as advocating “pseudo scientific research.”
With Francesca Grifo as EPA’s new top scientific integrity official, we can expect EPA to vigorously apply the scientific suppression tactics emobied in the UCS Sound Science Initiative. EPA has just lost what little credibility it had left when it comes to objective science.