The folks at Fox News were fuming this week that the EPA apparently suppressed an internal “scientific report” the questioned the rational for listing CO2 as a pollutant under the Clear Air Act.

Sunshine is said to be the best disinfectant, so lets drag this stinky story into the light of day and give it a good airing out.

First of all, the report is hardly secret since it has been helpfully posted on the websites of the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and several other cheerleaders for the denial industry. The file is available here and if you are having troubling sleeping, you may find it a useful read.

The person listed as the author of the report, Alan Carlin, is not a scientist all, but an economist who works for National Center for Environmental Economics. But is seems Carlin had some considerable help.

Several years ago Ken Gregory of the Astroturf group Friends of Science compiled an eye-glazing compendium of the mish mash of pseudo science that passes for the climate skeptic brain trust. According to the good folks at Real Climate, it seems the Carlin report simply imports sections of this verbatim. Gregory’s name is also referenced 20 times in the report.

Other notorious sources referenced include Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and our old friend S. Fred Singer.

But what about un-referenced sources? I took the liberty of randomly plugging in quotes from Carlin’s report into a helpful search engine called Plagiarism Checker.com. Guess what? It turns out that some sections  appear to have been lifted verbatim and unreferenced from the website of Patrick Michaels, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

The world's largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial.

While most climate activists are focused solely on the Waxman-Markey legislation that is due to be voted on by the US Congress any time now, a group of youth climate activists are taking the time to make sure that President Obama and Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel know that the youth movement demands strong action at the upcoming

It’s a small world after all. Turns out that a PowerPoint being trotted out by House Republicans to undermine the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill was apparently created by none other than dirty fuel giant Peabody Energy.

Grist broke this hilarious story by burrowing into the PowerPoint file properties, revealing the “author” was Peabody CEO Greg Boyce and their communications services manager Chris Taylor was listed as the file “manager.”

Oops.

As if Republican clean energy opponents needed another hit to their already battered credibility, it seems the fossil fuel industry is now even writing their talking points for them.

The PowerPoint and related teleconference event was apparently intended to ““highlight how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax will make it more expensive for rural Americans to fertilize the crops, put fuel in the tractor and food on the table.”

Such scare tactics are now in high rotation on the Hill as the battle heats up for the energy  future of America. Separate bills in the House and Senate are being assailed by vested interests in the powerful carbon lobby, as evidenced by this latest incredible fiasco.

Let’s assume that the Obama administration and Congress get their act together this year and make good on their pledge of enacting meaningful climate legislation by establishing the nation’s first cap-and-trade system.

Let’s further assume, for the sake of argument, that the administration, working with its international partners, succeeds in drafting a robust successor to the Kyoto Protocol at the climate talks in Copenhagen later this year.

If we accept that the U.S. climate bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), will accomplish its goal of bringing down emission levels 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050—which is nothing to sneeze at when you consider that a substantial fraction of policymakers (including some Democrats) vehemently oppose the measure—then the question becomes: Will it be enough to prevent the worst of climate change?

Bostonian rebuffs denier darling Richard Lindzen

A Boston art dealer sacrificed an easy buck recently in a principled protest against the writings of the climate change denier-darling Dr. Richard Lindzen, according to an outraged story by the junk scientist and cigarette salesman, Steve Milloy.

Prof. Lindzen (inset) is a senior scientist at MIT, a man who has had an impressive scientific career, but who for the past decade has made himself famous and much-loved in the climate change denial community by quibbling about narrow aspects of climate change science.