CA Files Suit Against Trump Administration Over Rollback of Federal Vehicle Emission Standards

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has filed yet another lawsuit against the Trump administration, this one on behalf of the California Air Resources Board Friday, claiming that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration  and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to comply with CARB’s September 2018 Freedom of Information Act request, in relation to data the agencies used to justify rolling back landmark Obama-era vehicle emission standards.

CARB is seeking to force the two federal agencies to provide data they used, accusing the Trump administration of “willfully withholding” information.

This is interesting since I am aware of a CPA in Stockton, CA who has filed numerous Public Records Requests with the CARB, asking for the data on CARB’s claims that 1,200 children die each year in the California Central Valley due to particulate matter in the air. So far, he says the CARB has ignored his California Public Records Requests.

One report by the Pacific Institute adds another 1,200 deaths to this claim: “The California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimated that freight transport each year causes 2,400 people to die prematurely; 2,830 people to be admitted to the hospital; 360,000 missed workdays; and 1,100,000 missed days of school,” the Pacific Institute says in a report funded by activist organizations, the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment, The Coalition for Clean Air and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “The cost of using cleaner equipment and safer technology is a small fraction of the health costs borne by California residents,” they conclude.

From the Newsom press release:

“The Trump administration is pushing a dangerous and unjustified rollback of commonsense standards. Americans will pay with their health and more fill-ups at the pump. California and other states need to do all they can to protect their citizens from this attack on clean air,” said Luke Tonachel, director for Clean Vehicles and Fuels at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Long History With The California Air Resources Board 

Tasked with overseeing climate change policy and improving California’s air quality, the California Air Resources Board operates like no other state agency. The rogue agency conducts its business in private, without the scrutiny of the public it is accountable to, despite legislative and public outrage over the shroud of secrecy.

In 2012, the CARB, with help from the Democratic Assembly Speaker, figured out a way to exempt itself from the state’s open meeting act. Government Code 11120, the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, is explicitly exempted in the language of a 2012 budget trailer bill authored by then-Assembly Speaker John Perez a Democrat from Los Angeles.

The California Air Resources Board has not played by their own rules for a long time, and even moved the goal line. The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, also known as AB 32, charged the California Air Resources Board with the responsibility of reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. This represents a 25 percent reduction statewide. However, the CARB took it one step beyond, and instead adopted the United Nation’s goal: “To avert catastrophic warming,” the world’s scientists have concluded we must reduce GHGs to 80 – 90% below 1990 levels by 2050.”

Many believe the motive is entirely economic by the “world’s scientists,” who want to maintain existing funding, as well as keep future funding flowing in. In order to do this, they must go along with the EPA’s and CARB’s goals.

The EPA and the CARB board insist their goals are the protection of the most vulnerable in society. It’s difficult to believe the EPA and the CARB are sincere when the EPA conducted diesel exhaust experiments on children at UCLA and USC, I wrote in 2015. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency paid the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles to conduct experiments on children, to determine whether exposure to diesel exhaust harms humans.

These experiments were illegal under the Nuremberg Code, California state law, and federal regulations, concerning the protection of human subjects in medical research, according to Energy and Environmental Legal Institute attorney David Schnare.

According to the EPA and CARB, smog causes everything from cardiovascular disease, to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. The big question is how can the UCLA and USC professors be so adamant on the lethality of particulate matter, and then conduct experiments of these particulates on children?

Gov. Gavin Newsom sent out a press release Friday about this new lawsuit:

Governor Gavin Newsom’s Administration today filed suit in federal court to compel two federal agencies to provide the underlying data and analysis used to support a radical rollback of federal vehicle emission standards that threatens the air quality and health of millions of Californians.

Yet nothing was done to UCLA or USC scientists for these illegal and immoral experiments on children.

In 2015, I wrote:

Schnare said parents were paid $75 to allow their children into the experiment however, they were not told what the experiment would be.

“The EPA said they put carbon particulates from diesel exhaust up the noses of the children. These nasty things are truly bad. This stuff sticks to the lungs, so these kids are going to have carcinogens sticking to their lungs for the rest of their lives,” Schnare said. “Carcinogens are known and expected to cause cancer.”

But the EPA said this isn’t dangerous.

So which is it? If diesel emissions aren’t dangerous, then why regulate them? If diesel emissions are dangerous, then scientists and the universities knowingly gave these kids a death sentence – for $75.

Indeed, which is it?

The only way EPA, USC and UCLA are not guilty of illegal experimentation on children is if EPA and CARB have been grossly distorting the dangers of carbon and diesel exhaust. In previous articles, I interviewed Dr. James E. Enstrom, PhD, MPH, FFACE, UCLA and Scientific Integrity Institute, who disagrees with the EPA’s and CARB’s determinations of carbon and diesel regulations. And he was fired by UCLA for daring to challenge their junk science.  Enstrom charged scientifically the the EPA and CARB doctored scientific experiments to deceive the public and Congress in order to declare costly and controlling regulations – and he won his job back at UCLA.

It is important to note, Duke University just agreed to pay the federal government $112.5 million as part of a settlement after a lawsuit alleged the university used fake research data to secure $200 million in federal research grants, the Daily Wire just reported. A researcher falsified data in the pulmonary, allergy, and critical care department in experiments she had run on mice lungs.

Dubious, Inconsistent “Science”

At a 2012 hearing of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, Professor Rob S. McConnell from USC and UCLA told the board, “Ozone and PM2.5 are making Southern Californians sick and die at greater rates that would occur otherwise.”

McConnell’s biography explains:

Rob S. McConnell is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Deputy Director of the NIEHS/EPA-supported Children’s Environmental Health Center. His research interests include effects of air pollution on the development and exacerbation of asthma, and he is the principal investigator of a large prospective cohort study in the Children’s USC Health Study to investigate these relationships. His work examining the associations between ozone and fresh traffic emissions with the development of asthma has contributed to the current policy debate on proper regulation of these exposures.

At the same SCAQMD hearing, UC Irvine professor, Dr. Robert Phalen, Ph.D., CIH, said in 50 years, the average person will not have ingested any more diesel exhaust than the equivalent of three pinches of salt.

Dr. Phalen and Dr. James Enstrom, a 34-year Ph.D. with UCLA, have long disputed the EPA and CARB diesel regulations, based on scientific fact. According to Enstrom, the single most important thing about science is the pursuit of truth to the greatest extent possible, using the scientific method. This philosophy didn’t set well with UCLA, which fired him for disagreeing with their philosophies. He sued and won his job back.

The latest California lawsuit defers to the “junk science” used by CARB and the EPA and ignores the evidence provided by scientists Enstrom and Phalen.

“Since releasing the proposed rule last summer, the Trump Administration has repeatedly failed to comply with California’s FOIA request, and the reason is clear: They are unwilling to admit that the facts and analysis simply do not support their desired outcome,” said CARB Chair Mary D. Nichols, in the press statement. “This lawsuit will break down their silence and secrecy. The public has a right to see all the facts and analysis used to support a rollback that increases oil consumption, hurts consumers, and pumps more air pollution and hundreds of million tons of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere.”

Expect to hear more from Dr. Phalen and Dr. Enstrom on the “silence and secrecy” of the California Air Resources Board. Because as Mary Nichols said, “The public has a right to see all the facts and analysis used to support a rollback…”

Perhaps now at last the public will learn why the cap and trade funds extorted from California businesses by way of carbon offset auctions, are being laundered through Western Climate Initiative, Inc., “WCI Inc.,” a Delaware Corporation formed by the California Air Resources Board under Mary Nichols, CARB Chairwoman. What is a state agency doing funneling public money to a Delaware shell Corporation? That’s easy. Wealthy individuals and businesses who want to mask their ownership stash billions of dollars in tax havens in Delaware, or offshore accounts. Nichols has never explained why WCI Inc. was registered as a Delaware corporation, and not registered instead in California, just as the businesses the California Air Resources Board regulates are.

Next: Scientific Misconduct by Another California University