Government Environmental Assessment: Where Integrity Is Not an Issue

WaPo reports on the back of its A section Saturday that

An Interior Department scientist returned to work Friday, six weeks after he was suspended in connection with a probe of whether he improperly assisted another polar bear researcher in obtaining a federal contract….

Monnett was being investigated for improperly helping a researcher at Canada’s University of Alberta draft a response to a federal request for proposals on a polar bear study. Monnett chaired the committee that eventually awarded the contract to the university.

In the letter, the special agent in charge quotes the contract officer as saying that if Monnett had informed her about his collaboration with the University of Alberta researcher, “she would have warned you that such actions would have been highly inappropriate under procurement integrity policies and procedures.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz wrote in an e-mail that Monnett “was informed that he will have no role in developing or managing contracts of any kind, and will instead be in our environmental assessment division.”

Because, apparently, integrity is not so much a concern there.

Although I do think I recall other such problems arising when such foxes guard the hen house. Oh, yeah, then there was this, too. Er, and this. A whole pattern of isolated incidents.

Well. This may be a good time to quote the UK High Court opinion about — per the judge — the global warming movement’s “alarmist” claims as featured in the film “An Inconvenient Truth”:

[Claimant attorney] has established his case that the views in the film are political by submitting that Mr Gore promotes an apocalyptic vision, which would be used to influence a vast array of political policies, which he illustrates in paragraph 30 of his skeleton argument:

(i) Fiscal policy and the way that a whole variety of activities are taxed, including fuel consumption, travel and manufacturing … (ii) Investment policy and the way that governments encourage directly and indirectly various forms of activity. (iii) Energy policy and the fuels (in particular nuclear) employed for the future. (iv) Foreign policy and the relationship held with nations that consume and/or produce carbon-based fuels.

So, what could possibly go wrong?