Laurie WIlliams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and veteran EPA lawyers wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post and posted a YouTube video critical of the current cap and trade legislation.

The authors favor CO2 reduction. They argue, however, that the recently passed House bill with its cap and trade provisions and offsets will not bring about the desired CO2 reduction. They prefer a plan for increasing fossil fuels prices through carbon fees with rebates to help smooth the transition to clean energy.

Although the authors specifically note that their opinions are their own and not the EPA’s, they acknowledge that their analysis was “informed by more than 20 years each at the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco Regional Office, including [Allan Zabel's] extensive experience overseeing California’s cap-and-trade and offsets programs for the EPA.”

According to Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal, after publishing the op-ed, the EPA informed the lawyers that they must remove any reference to the EPA in their writings, any future “outside writing projects” must be pre-approved by the EPA, and they must take down their YouTube video critical of cap and trade legislation.

Scott Fulton, the EPA general counsel told the Wall Street Journal that the lawyers ran afoul of federation regulations not by the content of their op-ed, but by the way they ” . . . highlighted their EPA experience in making their arguments . . .”

Here is the link to the banned video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSNQzSjb38g

In case that link disappears -

Further reading: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/11/09/gagged-epa-clamps-down-on-couple-critical-of-cap-and-trade/

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Copyright 2009 - K.J.Collins