Lauren Kurtz

19 posts

Arizona Appeals Court Vacates Ruling Against Climate Scientists, and Rules that Protections for Scientific Research Must Be Considered

On September 14, the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division II, ruled that a trial court decision to release climate scientists’ emails had improperly ignored an Arizona statutory protection for university records.  In this case, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (“E&E Legal”) has been attempting to use open records laws […]

Wyoming Federal Court Upholds Law Criminalizing “Unlawful Collection of Resource Data”

A July 2016 federal court decision has upheld Wyoming laws that impose criminal and civil penalties for collection of “resource data”[1] when the collection involves trespassing on private lands, even when the trespass is unintentional, and even when the trespass is incidental to the collection. The Wyoming legislature enacted these […]

Increasing Number of Investigations into Fossil Fuel Industry’s “Disinformation Campaign”

In recent months, there has been a growing succession of actual and proposed investigations into fossil fuel companies, and their purported collaborators, over whether these groups lied to the public or investors about the risks of climate change. The investigations come amid a series of reports that the fossil fuel […]

Rep. Lamar Smith Accuses NOAA of Potentially Violating Its Own Scientific Integrity Policies, And Threatens “Compulsory Process”

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is continuing his campaign for internal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documents, including new claims from an unnamed whistleblower that NOAA scientists “potentially violat[ed] NOAA’s scientific integrity policies.” Rep. Smith has also now threatened to use an unspecified “compulsory process” to obtain the desired documents […]

Canadian Government Ends Restrictions on Government Scientists’ Public Communications

On November 4, 2015, Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada. Less than 48 hours later, the new administration announced it was ending restrictions on federal scientists’ public communications.[1] The previous Conservative government, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, tightly vetted communications from all […]