Environmental policies are being driven by bureaucratic ideologues. Science has little to do with it.

Dan Walters: Cover-up taints costly diesel policy
By DAN WALTERS
2009-12-03 15:22:10
A year ago, high officials of the California Air Resources Board learned that the author of a statistical study on diesel soot effects had falsified his academic credentials.
The researcher, Hien Tran, acknowledged the deception and agreed to be demoted, but after his data were given another peer review, they remained the basis of highly controversial regulations that will cost owners of trucks, buses and other diesel-powered machinery millions of dollars to upgrade their engines. The Tran study concluded that diesel "particulate matter" was responsible for about 1,000 additional deaths each year.
Only recently, with the rules on the verge of final promulgation, did board officials formally acknowledge Tran's falsification, largely because one board member, cardiologist John Telles, did his own investigation and complained about an apparent cover-up.
Telles, in sharp letters to board officials and during last month's CARB meeting, said the chain of events casts a pall over the legitimacy of the vote to proceed with the new rules.
"Failure to reveal this information to the board prior to the vote not only casts doubt on the legitimacy of the truck rule, but also upon the legitimacy of CARB itself," Telles said, adding, however, that he doesn't question the validity of the science.
Industry critics have jumped on the revelation that Tran falsely claimed he received a doctorate from the University of California, Davis, but the board's staff rejects the complaints.
"What Tran did was bad," James Goldstene, CARB's executive officer, said Tuesday, "but the science was sound."
"Nobody was kept in the dark," Goldstene said in response to Telles. "I don't think his point is valid."
However, Mary Nichols, CARB's chairwoman, told Telles in a Nov. 10 e-mail that the "staff response was a matter of poor judgment, but not deceptive or irresponsible," and she added her personal apologies "for failing to convey information you were entitled to have."
In July 2008, Dr. S. Stanley Young, an official of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, wrote to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, complaining that, "none of the authors (of the report) are professional statisticians." Four months later, California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams told Young – in a letter drafted by Tran – that the study team was qualified, citing Tran's UC Davis doctorate.
Shortly thereafter, just one day before CARB was to act on the truck rules, board officials learned of the false doctorate after a University of California professor who's critical of the rules told them that Tran lacked the degree, but only a few board members were informed. Although reports of Tran's deception circulated for months, including a couple of brief media mentions, it wasn't until recently that CARB officials publicly acknowledged it.
As Telles says, the apparent cover-up casts a pall over the legitimacy of a very important, and very costly, state policy.

Here's a story about Trans credentials:
(see link for photo of degree)

Thornhill University: Where the air board's diesel expert got his Ph.D.
The California Air Resources Board has yet to honor my request to see the 38 exhibits in the Hien T. Tran academic fraud case. Tran was the lead researcher on a scientific study that was used to justify sweeping, costly new diesel emission rules proposed by the CARB staff. He admitted Dec. 10 to CARB that he lied about having a Ph.D. in statistics from UC Davis. Instead, Tran said, his Ph.D. was from "Thornhill University." Nevertheless, the air board still voted unanimously to adopt the rules based on his research Dec. 12 -- without acknowledging Tran's deception.
Anyways, I obtained the exhibit showing Tran's fake Ph.D. from another source. How impressive -- the $1,000 got him a "magna cum laude" plaudit from Thornhill University, not just a diploma.
Check out the web site of the diploma mill here. Those running it can't even be bothered to put up a good fake site. Click on the "Prospective Student" link and you go to what appears to be the home page of an Israeli domain registration site.
Is this significant? Maybe. A Google hunt turned up this amazing twist -- a January 2008 story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about Avrohom Mondrowitz, an alleged serial child molester who posed as a rabbi and "community psychologist" and who escaped prosecution in New York by fleeing to Israel:
As far as the Israel Police know, Mondrowitz is currently devoting most of his energy, in the many leisure hours at his disposal, to the Internet. There he gratifies his deviant inclinations by watching clips of sadistic activity and pedophilic material. In his remaining time he makes a living by issuing bogus academic degrees to all comers, particularly to students from the Third World. He has emblems and logos from various universities, as well as seals, examples of signatures and registration forms. He refers most of the students to Thornhill University, in London, which grants degrees by correspondence and has a branch in Brooklyn.
So Tran's degree comes from an Internet diploma mill associated with someone Haaretz calls a notorious, depraved pedophile!! Too bizarre.
Now will you cover this, California media? Now is it interesting enough?
It's been six days since I broke the story that the air board unanimously approved sweeping, unprecedented rules based on the work of a scientist that the board knew had been lying about his credentials. Isn't that, yunno, news????
But according to Nexis, the only newspaper to detail this is my own, in this editorial.
Meanwhile, the Sac Bee recently had the room to run a 900-word piece about how homeowners can get rid of bermuda grass without killing the surrounding fescue and other crucial gardening issues. It also had room for a 600-word analysis on "Keep white shirts white: How to avoid perspiration stains."
But report on a juicy scandal with great twists -- the fact that Tran wasn't fired; the Mondrovitz stuff; the other challenges to the air board's veracity -- involving a high-profile agency whose actions are often copied by environmental regulators around the world? Nah, there's no room for that.
Mary Nichols is the luckiest woman in the world.

Could you imagine any circumstance in the business world where Mr. Tran would not have been immediately fired and his worked tossed? But, government agencies march to their own drummer unfettered by reality or morals. I understand that CARB has refused a request by the Governor to meet with him. Bureaucratic arrogance to match their Democrat leanings. Do you believe there is one person at CARB who is not a Democrat. We need to start dismantling this burgeoning totalitarian state now.