by EdwardTeller
PEER Releases Email Showing White House Manipulation of BP Gulf Leak Info
10:33 pm in Uncategorized by EdwardTeller
International Bird Rescue Research Center/Flickr
I. On Monday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) announced that they have gotten positive proof of what many of us had been suspecting back in the spring of 2010, that the White House pressured government scientists to lowball how bad the BP Gulf of Mexico blowout really was:
Top Obama officials manipulated scientific analyses of independent experts to seriously lowball the amount of oil leaking from the BP Deepwater Horizon, according to a scientific integrity complaint filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Documents obtained by PEER through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit indicate White House pressure to present low-range estimates as best estimates. In fact, numbers presented to the public were less than half the true flow rate.
On May 19, 2010, one month after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the White House announced creation of a group of experts from academia, industry and government to generate an accurate and independent estimate of the oil leak rate. This group was called the Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG).
It is important to post the email pointing toward what kind of pressure the FRTG was under at the time (emphases added):
From: McNutt, Marcia [mailto:marcia@xxx] Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 10:04 AM To: rileyj@xxx; pmbommer@xxxs; Franklin.Shaffer@xxx; pedro.espina@xxx; aaliseda@xxx; lasheras@xxx; savas@xxx; pdy@xxx; ira.leifer@xxx; Wereley, Steven T. Cc: bill.lehr@xxx; vlabson@xxx Subject: Pending developments
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