Dr. Alan Carlin has been carrying out or supervising economic and scientific research on public policy issues for more than 40 years, first at The RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, and from 1971 to 2009 at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington DC. During that time he carried out or supervised more than a hundred policy-related studies on climate change, pollutant assessment, energy economics and development, environmental economics, transportation economics, benefit-cost analysis, and economic development.

Dr. Carlin is the author or co-author of six published papers on climate change or energy pricing. For seven years he supervised the production of a wide variety of criteria documents very similar in concept (but not in implementation) to EPA’s draft endangerment Technical Support Document. He is a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.

Dr. Carlin has an extensive background of working with and in environmental organizations as a volunteer. In the late 1960s he worked very closely with the Sierra Club to present economic arguments against the construction of two proposed dams in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. This campaign was ultimately successful and the dams were not built. In 1970–71 he served as chairman of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, then the Club’s second largest chapter. He received the Chapter’s Weldon Heald award for conservation work.

Dr. Carlin, now retired, was a 37-year career environmental economist and scientist at EPA when, in June 2009, the Competitive Enterprise Institute broke the story of his negative 100-page report reviewing the agency’s draft Endangerment Finding. As a result, Dr. Carlin’s supervisor ordered him not to discuss climate change with anyone outside his group and to stop working on the issue.

EPA’s attempt to silence Dr. Carlin became a highly publicized embarrassment to the agency, especially given Administrator Lisa Jackson’s and President Barack Obama’s announced commitment to transparency and scientific integrity. Press coverage included CBS News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the London Telegraph.

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