Raul better call Saul, what goes around comes around.
Via Washington Times
Rep. Raul M. Grijalva’s investigation into the funding sources of seven professors has triggered a round of Freedom of Information Act requests by two free market think tanks in an effort to learn more about the financial backings of climate professors aligned with the “consensus” or “warmist” school of thought.
At the same time, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a FOIA request with the Environmental Protection Agency asking for correspondence related to climate change from Mr. Grijalva, Arizona Democrat, and three Democratic senators — the same three investigating whether 100 fossil fuel companies and trade associations have funded climate research.
Mr. Grijalva’s probe into academic research funding has been likened to McCarthyism, but Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher Horner said the point of the latest round of requests isn’t that one good witch-hunt deserves another.
Rather, the inquiries are aimed at “reminding those who think it’s a one-way street that, since the congressman seeks only information from people who dare disagree with him, we can do what they do,” said Mr. Horner, who also filed the Grijalva-inspired FOIAs on behalf of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic and the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.[…]
The parallel investigations mark the latest example of bias hunting in climate science, a field coming under increased political scrutiny as the stakes surrounding the global warming debate soar.
Four years ago, meteorologist Anthony Watts coined the term “foilball” to refer to efforts to beat back FOIA requests aimed at rooting out institutional bias stemming from high-profile conflicts at the University of East Anglia and the University of Virginia.
The UVA brouhaha erupted after Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II and the American Tradition Institute began digging into the research funding of professor Michael Mann, a leading “warmist” and creator of the “hockey stick” theory of climate change.
The Virginia Supreme Court squelched Mr. Cuccinelli’s investigation in 2012, and the university reportedly spent $600,000 to fight the American Tradition Institute’s FOIA requests in the name of academic freedom. Less noticed was that Greenpeace had asked UVA for funding-related information about climate professor Patrick Michaels, a well-known “skeptic.”