FOIA reveals NASA's Hansen was a paid witness
"We're going to punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends," President Obama famously told Hispanics in a Univision interview before last year's midterm election. And as Dr. James Hansen has just learned, your status as Obama's "friend" or "enemy" can flip fast.
Hansen, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been a darling of the progressive movement since he first testified on global warming before the Senate in 1988.
Since that time, Hansen has been a relentless activist for draconian regulations on fossil fuels. This past Sunday, for the second time this year, Hansen was arrested outside the White House protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline.
But while that activism was accepted while a Republican was in the White House, such behavior simply cannot be tolerated while Obama is in the White House.
So on Friday the Obama administration stopped fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and released documents showing that Hansen was paid $250 an hour by a Canadian law firm for testimony against developing Alberta's oil sands; income which Hansen does not appear to have disclosed.
American Tradition Institute director of litigation Chris Horner first filed a FOIA request with NASA for records on Hansen's outside employment in February, but the Obama administration initially fought the request, even litigating the matter in court.
Then, all of a sudden last Friday, the Justice Department sent Horner the documents he had requested.
A January 20, 2009, document shows that the Canadian law firm Ackroyd LLP retained Hansen to prepare a report "regarding the anticipated greenhouse gas emissions from the Joslyn Oil Sand Mine."
Ackroyd represents the Oil Sand Environmental Coalition (OSEC), a group fighting to stop oil sand development. Federal government employees are not allowed to accept money for expert testimony in proceedings before a court or agency of the United States. But Hansen was testifying before a Candian court, so as long as he disclosed the payments, the agreement should have been legal.
It is still unclear how much money Hansen received from Ackroyd, however, since his 2010 financial disclosure form did not list them as a source of income. Neither does his 2009 form. There is also no record of his disclosing any travel expenses related to his 2010 oil sands testimony in Canada.
If approved by the State Department, Keystone would bring about 700,000 barrels of oil a day -- 255.5 million barrels a year -- from Alberta, Canada, across the U.S. border, and then south to the Gulf Coast at Houston and Port Arthur.
Activists like Hansen oppose the pipeline because, while hundreds of pipelines already cover much of the same ground, the Alberta oil will come from tar sands whose production, according to critics, emits three times more greenhouse gas than the average barrel of oil consumed in the United States.
The Keystone XL pipeline has become a political headache for Obama. At a time when Obama is demonizing corporations for sitting on profits, and is pushing for more infrastructure spending to create construction jobs, the Keystone XL project would have injected $7 billion in infrastructure spending into the economy.
Unions like the AFL-CIO are firmly in favor of the project, while environmental activists like Hansen, Friends of the Earth, and the Natural Resources Defense Council are against it.
Obama would prefer the issue would simply disappear. While he told a Nebraska TV station last week that he would personally make the final call on the project, it now seems likely the decision won't come until after the 2012 election. We'll see if Hansen stays silent until then.
