Faulty numbers reveal big problems with Ferguson’ DOE (and The Seattle Times)
The week before last Thanksgiving, the Washington State Department of Ecology (DOE) released a report touting that its controversial and expensive Climate Commitment Act (i.e. the CCA or the “carbon tax” which has increased the price for a gallon of gas by approximately 50 cents in our state) had removed 7.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases from the environment. To put this number into perspective – this amount is equivalent to taking 40% of all cars and trucks off Washington’s roads for a year. This is an impressive amount.
The Seattle Times’ “Climate Lab” reporter Conrad Swanson, always eager to point out the rare times when the Democrats enact policies which work, failed to check the numbers himself before rushing to post a front-page story highlighting the report.
The problem is the numbers were wrong. And they weren’t wrong by only a little, but by an incredible 96%! Instead of 7,500,000 metric tons of carbon materials removed from our environment, the actual amount is only 78,000 metric tons.
Worse, it took our state government (and The Times’ reporter Conrad Swanson) more than six weeks to discover that they were wrong. Yet last November it took an outside analyst just a few minutes to look at the numbers to find the obvious errors.
Just hours after the DOE’s Thanksgiving announcement, the Washington Policy Center’s Todd Myers posted a chain of tweets describing exactly what was wrong with the DOE’s data and why its numbers were not even close to the actual amount.
So while it took Myers and his calculator just a few minutes to prove that the DOE released faulty numbers, it took the state six weeks to partially correct its November media release (stating the problem was a “data entry error.”)
After the state finally admitted its significant error, The Times’ Conrad Swanson wrote a short article describing DOE’s error, yet the story does not mention that neither he nor his editors had ever independently checked the state’s original figures the way that Myers did.
Without getting into the debate on the merits of the expensive Climate Commitment Act (which Myers discusses briefly in this interview with Jason Rantz), this incident should raise concerns regarding the Department of Ecology if it cannot notice such obvious unrealistic numbers before making them public in a highly touted report. The DOE has more than 2,000 employees and not one of them took a few minutes (like Myers did) to double-check the results to discover the huge errors in their report.
The Seattle Times continues its rapid decline into becoming the Democrat Party’s daily newsletter. Besides taking Democrat politicians on matinee movie dates (and providing them the opportunity to spew hate against their political opponents) and not posting stories that contradict the failed policies of its Homelessness Project liberal funders, it seems that its “Climate Lab” is just another way the financially struggling newspaper has sold its journalistic integrity. Evidently the wealthy environmental groups have bought the privilege of saying whatever they want and The Seattle Times and its reporters won’t even independently verify the data before writing a glowing article using the faulty numbers. (FYI – the November 26th story has yet to be corrected by the Times)