What do you do if you don’t like the results?

If you are the government, you have the power to either cover them up, or ignore them.  Twice this week articles have been written demonstrating this “troubling” practice.

In the first such article, the EPA has simply “deleted” certain information it apparently didn’t want the public to know.  In May of this year, the EPA issued its proposed rule that will affect all coal fired power plants.  Many companies have said that the rule will force them to close power plants as the cost of compliance is prohibitive.  This, of course, raises questions about whether we will be able to generate sufficient power to meet our needs.

This, from the EPA’s original draft:

the EPA concedes that it ‘is aware that concerns have been expressed by some, even in advance of this proposed rule, that this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electric grid.’ The agency admits that what it calls ‘sources integral to reliable operation’ may be forced to shut down—those would be the coal-fired plants the EPA is targeting—and that these retirements ‘could result in localized reliability problems.’

“Localized reliability problems” is government speak for blackouts, brown outs and rolling outages.

Mysteriously, though, in the final document all of that language was gone…poof.

In the second article, we learned that in connection with a separate rule regarding coal itself,

A former Interior Department consultant said officials told him to change his firm’s calculations after they led to an estimate that a proposed coal-mining rule could cost as many as 7,000 jobs.

That disclosure was made this week before a congressional hearing that is seeking to postpone this proposed rule until 2014.  The disclosure was made by J. Steven Gardner, president of a consulting firm hired by the government to assess the impact on jobs.  According to Mr. Gardner, his firm was asked,

to revisit the [coal] production impacts and associated job-loss numbers, and with different assumptions that would then change the final outcome to show less of an impact.

Mr. Gardner testified that, his company,

unanimously refused to use a fabricated base line scenario.

His firm was fired, and a new company has been hired who may or may not agree to “use a fabricated base line scenario”.

This type of conduct is becoming increasingly popular with this administration (See: Obamacare).  Hide the truth, conceal the facts, and do whatever is necessary to get what you want.