The EPA should be dismantled yet this morning - today's edition

Remember my post from a few days ago about EPA chief Gina McCarthy telling a Senate committee of overwhelmingly favorable response to new drinking-water regs, and how it was found that the agency had ginned that support up, thereby flouting nearly three decades' worth of DoJ legal opinions determining that such grass-roots lobbying was partisan lobbying?

Well, it's at it again, on the mining-permit front:

Government agencies have a certain descending order of excuses they employ as a scandal grows. When they reach the point of quibbling over semantics and blaming low-level employees, it’s clear they know they’ve got a problem.

The EPA has a problem: its pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine, a proposed project in southwest Alaska. The law says that Pebble gets to apply for permits, and the Army Corps of Engineers gets to give thumbs up or down. The EPA, a law unto itself, instead last year blocked the proposal before applications were even filed. The agency claims it got involved because of petitions from Native American tribes in 2010, and that its veto is based on “science”—a watershed assessment that purportedly shows the mine would cause environmental harm.

This column reported a week ago on EPA documents that tell a very different story. They reveal the existence of an internal EPA “options paper” that make clear the agency opposed the mine on ideological grounds and had already decided to veto it in the spring of 2010—well before it did any “science.” Emails showed an EPA biologist, Phil North, working in the same time frame with an outside green activist to gin up the petitions. It’s not much of a leap to suggest that the EPA encouraged the petitions so that it would have an excuse to intervene, run its science as cover, and block a project it already opposed.

None of this looks good, and in a nearby letter EPA Region 10 Administrator Dennis McLerran is already bringing up semantics. According to the EPA—and other environmental groups now picking up the same line—the agency didn’t “veto” the project, but simply put “restrictions” on it. Indeed. The “restrictions” are that Pebble can’t build its mine, or for that matter even a significantly smaller one. Veto, restrictions, it’s all the same thing. The EPA killed the project. 

In a conversation with me last week, Mr. McLerran also turned to the “underlings did it” excuse. Asked about the options paper that shows the EPA’s early determination to veto the mine, Mr. McLerran told me: “I have never seen that options paper. None of the key decision makers have seen that options paper. It came out in this disclosure process. It is a preliminary document, done by lower level staff.” 

Doesn't wash, Mr. McLerran:

 . . the list of EPA employees who make up the core group discussing the options paper are not a bunch of low-level chemists and permit writers. Most have real titles: Mike Bussell,then the director of the EPA’s Office of Water and Watersheds in Seattle; David Allnutt, then acting regional counsel; Linda Anderson-Carnahan, then acting associate director of environmental cleanup; Tami Fordham, then policy adviser. Mr. McLerran says no “key decision makers” saw the options paper. It must depend on what the definition of a key decision maker is. 

Several of those included in these email chains would go on to take active roles in performing the EPA’s “watershed assessment” of the mine project. Ms. Fordham is listed as a contributor, as is an EPA officer named Richard Parkin. Mr. North, deeply involved in both the options paper and in getting the tribes to file their petitions, is one of the report’s primary authors. Emails show he actively lobbied his co-authors and report contributors on the merits of a veto. Mr. McLerran says “key decision makers” decided to perform three years of “science” on Pebble. But it turns out those doing the science were those who had already decided to block the mine. 

An inspector general is set to look into this.

Is anybody else getting annoyed at the way the Left trots out the word "science" in conversation as some kind of tactical tool for asserting superiority and shutting down further discussion?

Science is nothing more than rigorous inquiry into whether natural phenomena can predictably produce quantifiable results.  It's not fraught with nobility, like "justice" would be in a sane world.  It's an approach to the world we live in, not a set of conclusion.

The EPA has no redeeming value.  It exists for no other reason than to impose totalitarianism.