Enviro-scientist draws flak, drops out of Denver EPA confab | SEE VIDEO
Staff / Colorado Public Advocate
A Boulder scientist accused of conspiring to fudge data in support of landmark litigation over oil drilling in the Amazon has pulled out of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conference in Denver this week amid a challenge to her credibility, including charges her research is tainted by an activist agenda.
Ann Maest, a geochemist and prominent environmental consultant featured in the controversial 2009 documentary, “Crude,” about the battle over drilling in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, was going to make a presentation Wednesday at an EPA conference on hardrock mining but now will be replaced by a colleague from a Boulder consulting firm with which she is affiliated. Citing allegations from a federal racketeering lawsuit filed last year against Maest and the consulting firm as well others involved in the Amazon litigation, Maest’s critics have launched a national campaign against her planned appearance at the Denver EPA gathering.
Some of those critics still are planning to protest Wednesday’s event at the Renaissance Denver Hotel in northeast Denver despite Maest’s absence from the dais. The pro-growth advocacy group Americans for Prosperity-Colorado has announced it is organizing a noon rally at the conference site against the EPA’s “regulators and biased scientists,” which it accuses of killing jobs.
“Ann Maest and Stratus Consulting are poster children for the kind of questionable, agenda-driven science that federal regulators and their green allies outside government use to block energy production, increase consumer costs, kill jobs and smother the American economy,” the group’s director, Jeff Crank, said in a statement released for the event.
Conference organizers confirmed late last week that Maest had been replaced but were vague about the reasons for the switch as well as about who had initiated it. An event planner helping put on the conference said Maest “called and said she was not able to participate” but acknowledged “there have been discussions about her participation” in the wake of the campaign to dump her. An EPA official co-chairing the conference said Maest’s name was on an earlier draft agenda but contended that her colleague at Boulder-based Stratus Consulting, who will take her place, rightly should have been the one to attend the conference all along because he is principal author of the work that was going to be presented. The EPA’s David Reisman contends it was “through some confusion” that Maest’s name appeared on the earlier draft agenda.
Yet, Reisman also acknowledged his office had received emails from those urging the agency to dump Maest from the program.
“I did see one or two of a hundred that went to my laboratory director,” he said.
Maest did not respond to requests for a comment.
Both Maest and Stratus, among numerous others, were named in the racketeering suit filed in February 2011 by Chevron Corp., which in turn is being sued by Ecuadorean and U.S. activist groups alleging environmental contamination of the Amazon by former U.S. oil company Texaco Petroleum Corp. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001.
The American legal team suing Chevron includes Maest and Stratus as environmental experts and is accused in the energy company’s filing in U.S. District Court in New York of colluding with key players to concoct its case and inflate its multibillion-dollar claim for damages.
The documentary “Crude” in part chronicles the class-action suit against Chevron; the film was criticized by
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