President Obama appointed SMU professor Al Armendariz to head up the EPA’s Region VI, to fanfare from the left, in November 2009. Prof. Armendariz’s SMU web site is…spare. From his resume linked there, we learn that at the time of his appointment he was officially a research associate professor in SMU’s Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering. His last private sector experience was in 1998, when he was a chemical engineer at Radian Corp for about three years. He appears to have no serious managerial experience prior to his EPA appointment to head Region VI. From associate professor to managing a bureaucracy that spans five states, including major oil producers Texas and Louisiana, is quite a leap.
Armendariz’s list of references on his resume is a who’s who of the loony left in Texas environmental politics.
Notice two of those names: Tom “Smitty” Smith and Jim Schermbeck. Both are well-known around Texas as left-wing, anti-business agitators. Schermbeck is the left-wing filmmaker who figured prominently in former Travis County DA Ronnie Earle’s indictment of Tom DeLay a few years ago. Schermbeck often operates as Erin Brockovich’s sidekick, running around Texas creating environmental scares and then taking those to court. He once opposed a road project in Ellis County, TX, claiming that some slag used to build the road would cause major health problems for residents living near it. After exhaustive and expensive scientific studies, it turned out that there was a problem with the slag: Prolonged exposure to it could cause body odor. So Schermbeck moved on to another project, and eventually got some industrial cement kilns shut down in Midlothian, TX, driving the price of cement up by restricting supply. He also killed a few Texas jobs along the way.
Schermbeck isn’t alone in creating environmental fear out of clean air. Sean Hackbarth reports that Al Armendariz has a similar history:
Five months after talking about crucifixion, his office went after Texas-based natural gas producer, Range Resources. In 2010, EPA accused the company of contaminating drinking water through hydraulic fracturing and ordered them to supply drinking water to two local homes. At the time, Armendariz said, “We are worried about the families’ safety. It was incumbent for us to act quickly.” He also feared natural gas would leak into homes causing fires. The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates natural gas production in the state disagreed and called the order “unprecedented.”
Armendariz jumped the gun, because fifteen month later, EPA rescinded the order. Karen Harbert, President of the Institute for 21st Century Energy called it “at least the third case where EPA rushed to judgment against unconventional oil and natural gas development only to find the scientific facts didn’t support its rhetoric.”
Range Resources wasn’t the first time Armendariz unfairly attacked oil and gas producers. Shortly after the video zipped around the blogosphere, Energy In Depth wrote about some anti-energy research Armendariz put together in 2009 that “found” that “the oil and gas sector likely has greater emissions [nitrogen oxides [NOx] and volatile organic compounds [VOCs] than motor vehicles” in the Dallas-For Worth region.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) found Armendariz’s report wanting.
Al Armendariz appears to be a typical Obama appointee — a rigidly ideological academician tied to activist radicals, with little private sector experience and next to zero managerial experience.
Update: Keeping in mind that the Dallas Observer is a lefty alternative newspaper, this profile of Armendariz in the Observer suggests that his environmental activism is motivated not by fair regulation or balancing the needs of business with protecting the environment, but by a lifelong quest for revenge. The Observer piece also details the longstanding relationship between Armendariz and the environmental activist left in Texas. His association with Schermbeck goes back a few years.
Update: Typical of an academic career, Armendariz has spent most of his career living off of government grants.
Update: Forbes describes Armandariz as the “boy who cried wolf.” (h/t Memeorandum)
– these disclosures since the press and media will not.
It’s downright embarrassing that someone with a chemical engineering degree can swallow that Gasland nonsense. I think there’s a reason why his real career never went anywhere.
As a chemical engineer myself, I’m ashamed to note that Lisa P. Jackson, EPA Administrator, with Cabinet rank, is a chemical engineer with a BSChE from Tulane, and a MSChE from Princeton.
I’d think a chemical engineer would have a better understanding of the issues than a mere bureaucrat. However, I’d also expect a chemical engineer to be capable of coming up with better pollution remedies than “Shut everything down!” These people must not be very good chemical engineers.
True story.
In my senior year, several of us were riding to a regional AIChE meeting in the department chair’s VW van. Another professor was riding shotgun, and three or four of us seniors were riding in the back. We came across a nuke plant on the opposite side of a river the road was following. I asked the dept chair why the cooling towers were shaped like that.
His answer was that he didn’t know, but there must be a good reason. The other prof didn’t know, either. It didn’t take me more than a few weeks on my first job, before the answer became obvious (hint: venturi).
There’s a real danger when you have people who’ve never had a real job teaching people who will. I eventually figured it all out, because they really did have the basics down well, but even years ago, we had a serious issue with professors who couldn’t tell a nut from a bolt.
Right now, higher ed, particularly in STEM, is one of the bright spots in the US economy. People from all over the world are willing to come here and pay a stiff premium for an American STEM education. Expect the bottom to fall out of that in the next decade, as a combination of factors conspire to make it no longer worth the money to foreign exchange students to come to a brick-and-mortar American university for a STEM education.
And they won’t be able to sell this to Americans either, for many of the same reasons, and the fact that they aren’t prepared to do serious math and science. The ones who can will, but they will be way to few and far between to amount to anything.
I had had an Aerospace Engineering prof who couldn’t explain the benefits of the upward sloped spoiler on the rear of a Camaro.
By George, I think you have finally hit upon it, Weedhopper!
Faculties are filled with lazy layabouts who spend all their time scamming funding, for “studies” of things that have no useful application. We call it “play” or “goofing off”. They call it “research”.
Obama can’t stomach people who can actually DO anything. They would make him look even more the fool than he does himself.
Can’t have that.
Close up the government and send everybody home. If we find out we really need anything, we can always start something back up again…without academics being involved!
>>>We are worried about the families’ safety. It was incumbent for us to act quickly.
Emergency is a key element of modern globo-socialist politics in the work to convert the political economy to look like a vision from the Faculty Lounge. When there’s an emergency ya gotta bend the rules a bit to survive. Lisa Jackson is a high end example of emergency action; poor Al is further down the Faculty Lounge food chain, but he’s doing fine.
The weird thing about this whole takeover we’re seeing is we could cut it down easily, cuz it’s illegal. Take a gander at the enumerated powers and it’s hard to see the EPA as it is continuing to exist were the law actually enforced.
We’re into the 55th month of the Great Recession emergency, when the longest one before that was 16 months going back to the Great Depression. There’s the mortgage crisis emergency, the environmental emergency, the man-caused global warming emergency, the voter rights emergency… so many emergencies, so little time. But plenty of resources. For now, at least.
Good point. The same “we must do something” mentality is what gave us TARP and Obamacare.
My Liberal father used to say “Just do something, even if it’s wrong” and “it’s better to do something with out permission and then ask for forgiveness later”. One of the many reasons that by 21 I was a card carrying Conservative. That and 4 years of Jimma’ the Bunny runner Carter.
Maybe he was a loony left environmentalist first and picked up the degree to give himself a credential.
His whole career doesn’t speak well for the environment, academia, SMU or the Obama Administration–but of course being a loony leftist is about their only requirement.
A few decades ago, it was actually hard to get a Chem E degree. That appears to no longer be the case.
Anyone who gets an engineering degree is soon faced with the choice of either taking on a “Mr. Inside” type of job that uses what you learned in college or going into management — usually more of “Mr. Outside” type of role. Choosing to use the skills learned in school means working on the same sort of skull-cracking problems that made school difficult, only now you can’t turn to the back of the book to get the right answer. Choosing management means reading and writing proposals mostly based on wishful thinking, going to lots of meetings (to discuss proposals, budgets, schedules), schmoozing, etc., etc., — and the only math required is the basic arithmetic needed to keep track of budgeting and your travel and meeting schedules. Also, after a few years the pay tends to be better and often you get your own secretary. Once you enter management, it’s very difficult to go back to doing real engineering, because your college-learned knowledge will disappear with remarkable speed. Not to worry, however, because many other careers beckon for those with a taste for public speaking, including government bureaucrat and science-based political activist (for example James Hansen).
Al Armendariz sounds like someone who never thought twice about going into management, and when that became boring, science-based political activist.
You are mostly correct; you forget to mention that engineering managers earn more than engineers – one reason that many engineers pursue the management route.
Why do the managers earn more money? Because they bring work thru the door to keep the nose-to-the-grindstone-engineers busy. Really, it is all based on supply and demand. There are many very good “real” engineers out there. There are not that many good engineering managers out there.
As for this EPA guy, I can only surmise he has always been a loser. You have to be a moron and total idiot to believe all the environmental garbage tossed out by the enviro wackos. If only 10% of what they claim were true, the human race would have disappeared 1000 years ago.
On the other hand, this SOB little Stalin POS is probably a hard core left wing looney almost all of whom care only about benefiting what they see when the look in a mirror.
This guy should be prosecuted – along with his bosses .
Where the hell is Congress in all of this? Why the hell are they allowing all this crap to occur? They established the EPA and they have the power to totally and completely abolish this very dangerous, repressive, left wing Stalinist agency.
“As for this EPA guy, I can only surmise he has always been a loser. You have to be a moron and total idiot to believe all the environmental garbage tossed out by the enviro wackos.”
It depends on how you define “loser”‘ He has power, prestige among his peers, great income, free helathcare, wonderful pension, plenty of paid leave time, sick pay, and on and on. All on your dime. This occurs in the private sector as well. Tune in Brian Williams tonight. There’s a “loser” who has celebrity, multi-million dollar income, secure future, and more. For these folks it is a matter of leaving your principles at the door and becoming a big winner by being a loser. They’ll gladly sell America down the drain, and they are doing it, they know it, and they could care less.
The engineering managers I encountered spent all their time in committee meetings so that if a decision worked out well they could all claim credit — that is, credit for bringing “work thru the door to keep the nose-to-the-grindstone-engineers busy” — and if a decision worked out poorly, they could all dodge the blame. If a calculation or design was really important, they liked to farm out the work to consultants — who then took the blame if it turned out to be faulty. Management perfection would be a consultant chosen by a committee — now that’s defense in depth! Believe me when I say, from what I’ve seen, that “Dilbert” is more documentary than comic strip.
Glad your experience has been so different from mine…
Middle management is a crappy job. Real engineering is an interesting and rewarding job. To get engineers to give up their interesting jobs and move into crappy jobs in middle management you have to pay them more. That’s “supply and demand”.
Rome’s Bureaucrats Better than the EPA’s at Increasing Prosperity! A historical review that shows that while Rome’s tactics created wealth, this administration’s has been full-of-fail. For example — PAX ROMANA vs POX OBAMA. And at least the Roman’s didn’t eat dog. Graphics and video included showing that brutish Roman soldiers also had more compassion for their victims than EPA bureaucrats.
Romans ate door mice as a delicacy, it’s probably best we don’t explore their culinary culture. I don’t blame Obama for eating dog. There are so many other things we could focus on rather than an inevitable act while living in Indonesia. I don’t like the idea of eating dog, but that’s what people eat there, just like the Spanish eat horse meat.
You lack a sense of irony
Actually the Indonesian government said they don’t eat dogs there. Obama’s step-father was just a sick &^%*(*&.
This is characteristic of this Admin– while Cabinet and other high-level appointments subject to Senate hearings were generally given to relatively mainstream to slightly-leftist Democrats, the secondary and tertiary-level appointments, the under-the-radar picks, overwhelmingly come from the kook Left.
What’s really diabolical about the scheme is that it’s precisely these lower-level politicals, guys like Armendariz, who actually hire the permanent Civil Service staff, ensuring kook control of the agency well beyond the next election. PJM has reported on the parallel practice at Justice.
Obama is recruiting the most leftwing and Marxists people in the US, namely anyone who works at an Americanized university. These useful idiots of the American left are now put in charge of our lives; the time for voting and debating is long passed; it is time to fight back against this Americanized horror that is coming at us.
When I was in the army, we called this kind of guy an Acting Jack. Kids who were given the first bit of authority in their lives and instantly became George Patton.
Our government is run by one, and is filled with others.
They rule us.
It’s not unusual you know. Most rulers in history have been the same way. We’ve been lucky in this country to have about 30 to 35 presidents who were actually adults. It’s unique in history.
The most dangerous combination of all is a blend of arrogance, ignorance, inexperience and lust for power. We have it in spades. It drips from every pore of the criminal administration. Why people think obama isn’t dangerous is beyond me. He would crucify you in a flash to get his way if he thought he could get away with it. His kind never has an iota of doubt, and feel completely justified in evrything they do.
Thank you, Mr. Preston, for the research. Nobody Important has added it to Another Slow News Day’s page devoted to Obamacabinet…
http://anotherslownewsday.wordpress.com/cabinet-level/
… under the “Lisa Jackson – EPA” section.
Visitors to ASND interested in dozens of additional details about Obama’s radical minions can navigate across the branches of the Barack Obama / Obamappointees menu tree and select from a variety of sub-topical options.
It reads like this fellow would be at home in the UN, or the Justice Department.
Come on Novemebr election.
“Typical of an academic career, Armendariz has spent most of his career living off of government grants.”
What do you expect? These people never, ever, ran a business, let alone a large or highly successful one. They are nothing but a bunch of socialists who expect the government to do everything for them. And, if Obama gets another four years in office, it will.
re: Update: Typical of an academic career, Armendariz has spent most of his career living off of government grants.
Actually, in Academia this is what you are supposed to do. If you try to actually do something useful or practical you will never get tenure and therefore have to teach undergraduate students – something they do not want to do. Once they have tenure their getting invited to parties is directly related to the size of their current grant. No grant or small grant – no invitations.
If Armendariz was an associate professor, he may or may not have been tenure track but he certainly didn’t have tenure yet. A research associate professor is low on the totem pole of academia. I’m guessing his job may have been writing research grant proposals. His political views were the only qualification he had for the EPA job he now holds. Chemical engineering had nothing to do with it.
The problem is personnel, dictatorial tyrants, but the root problem lies in our laws. The basic laws underpinning the EPA, the Clean Water, Air, Ground, etc. were purposely drafted to be vague, “do good” laws. The regulators’ stated policy therefore, is to drive the envelop of hard requirements to the limit. They will not stop until some court constrains them by a hard written order. Their cost analyses are a joke, or madness, untethered to any real cost structure. This is absolutely required or else they would be forced to self limit their dictates.
The only new information comes from an “open mic” situation, the stated goal, of a powerful bureaucrat to drive an industry out of existence. It is not an accident of history that millions of US industrial jobs were off shored. America is clean, slightly, but unemployed.
There is a real threat to technology badly used. It is complicated, scientists and engineers are absolutely needed to scope danger. But our problem is that this talent is subordinated to corporate, or government dictators. We now have Exxon science and contradictory EPA science, which is meaningless by definition. Science means to know, not guess, not fudge.
When a regulator brags that he will drive an industry out of existence, crucify them into subordination, and has the power to do it, our democracy have a lethal problem. We live under bad law.
Yup. But rejoice, they do not realize that by restricting our use of our own coal, gas and oil now that it insures that the US will be the only one left with these resources. At some point we will push these useless twits aside and use these resources. In a way they are ensuring that the US will rise again. More powerful in a resource weaken world.
Just like in Ayn Rand: the producers and the destroyers.
This little bastard is Exhibit #1 as to why winning the November election will not be enough. Bastards like him have burrowed into every recess of our government like termites and will have to be driven out, dug out and burned out. The fact that they have the authority to make law and enforce it makes them an unmonitored and unrestricted shadow government that is tyrannizing us, REGARDLESS OF WHO WE ELECT IN NOVEMBER. I have less and less hope that this infestation will be turned around by normal democratic processes. They are too deeply embedded and have the sympathy and cover of the national media who will screech like scalded dogs if any of these ‘noble public servants’ get their well deserved walking papers.
You should see their building in DC. Makes the UN building look like a slum.
“a rigidly ideological academician tied to activist radicals, with little private sector experience and next to zero managerial experience.”
Were you describing the EPA guy, or President Obama? Because it fits both quite well.
After we get rid of Obama, we’re going to have a heck of a job cleaning out all the nutjob pseudo-Marxists he littered government with.
That is correct. Federal bureaucrats view Republicans as occupiers (in the original sense), and Democrats as liberators.
Under GOP administrations bureaucracies go into insurgency mode.
The difference between the ancient Romans and this guy is that the Romans physically dominated their adversaries. If this little pencil-neck fåggot ever came around trying to crucify me I punch him in four eyes. Typically p@ussified wimp behind a computer comparing himself to a Roman legionnaire. He needs his åss kicked on principle alone.
Do you have any idea how low a research associate professor in the university hierarchy? That qualifies him to be an EPA head?
I just learned a new (old) Chinese proverb:
“Winners become emperors. Losers become bandits.”
The problem with the Obama administration is that the bandits won.
I couldn’t get this to load for some reason. I see most of you hit on most of what I did, but here’s my two cents, previously written while trying to get this page to load.
“relatively mainstream to slightly-leftist Democrats”
I think they do their best to hide their true radical-ness, so they can eventually achieve the appointments they desire, where they then can unleash to do the most damage. Many were also appointed during recess, or as in the last go round, appointed while in session by the wanna be king, constitution be damned. Laws? What laws? He/they don’t need no stinkin laws!
And yes, the admin is chock full of these radicals. I believe being a radical, finding any way(s) possible to implement their tyrannical scheme, is the only requirement in this admin. After the DOJ Every Single One series, I was hoping PJ would continue along that thread and keep going through the entire admin, then the agencies, from tippy top to very bottom, and show not just how many, but also how radical. But, I suppose that would be a full time non-stop job.
What is really creepy is how they, and all the lefty outside groups everywhere, and I do mean EVERYWHERE, are always eventually tied to Soros and some of the same players that also always show up. And they are all either working FOR, or WITH, our gov’t, in multitudes of ways, all intermingled in “partnerships”. The monster that they are has endless tentacles, building webs upon webs and are absolutely everywhere, and into absolutely everything. And WE are paying for it with tons and tons grant money, tax money, tax exemptions, OUR money. They work diligently in every direction, flooding everything, to weasel in their tyrannical grand plan. Of course they can’t actually tell anyone what they are trying to do or people would be dead set against it. So they call them nice names with nice words, and claim they are doing wonderful things, using all the useful idiots they’ve dumbed down via our education system forcing their cult mentality. Try to point it out though, talk facts and sense, and they call you conspiracy theorists. Isn’t there a book about this or something? LOL
Also extremely frightening is how badly they skew what we used to call science, or scientific, or technical, or data, or studies, or tests, etc. You can’t trust anything anymore. It is all very scary.
Remember:
Just because you paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!
Here’s a couple perfect and recent examples:
http://freebeacon.com/unholy-trinity/
“The self-described “Catholic” group protesting Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R., Wis.) speech at Georgetown University Thursday has ties to the Obama administration and left-wing advocacy groups funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.”
And:
http://freebeacon.com/friends-like-these/
““What’s clear is that Lafe Solomon, just seven days after filing his complaint, was forwarding along emails from former ACORN and union buddies,” Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, told the Free Beacon. “That’s yet another factual predicate showing the biased and arbitrary nature of the NLRB’s decision.”
All intertwined and wreaking havoc at light speed.
Who is he?
He’s the research assoiciate who thinks there were Turkish towns in the days of the ancient Roman Empire. Way to go with the colossal anachronism, dude.
I think he was confusing Romans with Romanians. It was Vlad (Dracula) Tepes who put the Turkish heads on pikes.
Close enough for EPA.
Or maybe he was thinking Romulans?
It’s a very thin resume for anyone with a continuing academic appointment, whether it’s as a “research associate professor” much less a normal associate professor making contributions to his discipline. He has grants but apparently they never resulted in few peer-reviewed publications. He mixes publications and presentations together to give an impression of more substance. There are also a few unexplained gaps from 1993-95 and 1998-2002.
It is also interesting that one of his references–Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians–is busy appealing decisions to lease coal on public lands in the the Thunder Basin of Wyoming, which is the largest coal producing region in the U.S. Seems like a group conspiracy to me.
I’m a BS Chem E from 1970 currently employed as an Senior Environmental Manager but with years of experience in production, process and consulting. With what I see around me I know that I will have a job forever simply because I am successful at minimizing the cost of compliance and still remain legal. Many consultants, and Radian was one such, have a very cozy relationship with the agencies and simply do not work at minimizing the cost of compliance. It is not their money, why should they. We need to do away with the EPA. The states can easily do what is required with more accountability. It is real simple folks. The less government the less corruption. The less power in one place the less abuse of power and with more accountability. Smaller government means less national debt, more productivity and more jobs. This will happen. Either as the result of election or due to collapse. Take your pick.
This is an excellent contribution. I, an older engineer, would attempt to add. I witnessed the layoff of thousands of engineers and design personnel as the ever more stringent EPA requirements drove profitable projects into the loss column and were cancelled. The human result is that the engineers who hung on to a pay check, would design a system they knew would not work, or be hideously wasteful, a “government design”. But they had no say in the technical decision making. Expand that dictatorship by thousands of regulators, with Dr. Armendariz pogrom mentality, and the national result is a list of crippled industries, or ones who moved to China. See my earlier comment, No. 11.
No engineer, lacking an independent source of wealth, can dictate to their client or employer the addition of $1 to a project due to personal engineering experience in pollution abatement. They can not tell a regulator that a billion dollar requirement is technically, or commercially, stupid. The professional societies are worthless in the conflict resolution; they have abdicated their standard and code authorities, and yielded to lawyers. In any regulated technology, engineering, in the private sector, is sick, or dead. I knew many Professional Engineers who drove cabs, ran motels, sold real estate, drove bull dozers, etc.
Hence, of your choices, I pick collapse of our industries, and possibly our nation. Our regulated technology is suicidal. Bigoted zealots like Dr. Armendariz simply accelerate the end of the disaster.
Our pollution laws, and power structures, do not work, have not worked, can not work.
Agreed. But the most galling part is they are so righteous about it.
By the way the Romans basically invented bureaucracy. The Senate or the Emperor would assign someone to head an agency. This person had life or death power over the “employees” (frequently slaves). So a change in direction, a reordering of priorities was easy to affect. Once Obama is out we might consider reviving the custom.
This guy is actively crucifying the electric provider for New Mexico, PNM Resources, as we speak. The EPA has ruled that the San Juan coal-fired plant must put on like $250 million worth of haze prevention equipment. The owners, PNM, have figured out how to achieve the same results in a different way for only $80 million. The state of NM and PNM apparently can’t even get this a-hole on the phone to discuss the situation. Last I heard they were getting ready to enforce the higher cost plan. Too bad, tough shit, etc. The EPA is out of control.
Another freaking Muslim to help bring America down? Thanks, Obama
All of the things the left rails against are things that work and the things they favor are things that don’t work.
Everything they hate comes from the Earth. Cement, oil, uranium, water, you name it, all come from the Earth. People who utilize the materials of the Earth aren’t taken them off the Earth, they are relocating them for their own benefit. So what? This is what:
Leftist hate people and they lie.
And Obama is King of the Leftists because he is the lyingest and hatefulest of them all.
If we conservatives don’t devise market-oriented solutions to the very real problems of air and water pollution and the health effects they cause, then the heavy hand of EPA and people like Al Armendariz are going to be the only solution on the table.
A natural gas or oil company that wants to start drilling wells near a residential community MUST take responsibility for whatever it puts into the air or water that is doing to drift over that residential community. They’re rich enough to buy up the homes of those homeowners at double their market value if necessary, and enable those homeowners to move elsewhere.
Perhaps they would refuse. In that case, Milton Friedman suggested that we simply tax those oil and gas companies and use the tax revenue to pay for the pollution abatement. That’s a lot simpler than EPA regulation.
But to just ignore the entire air and water pollution problem because doing something about it might get in the way of untrammeled economic growth is not viable anymore. If pollution causes health problems, that drives up health care costs in America.
The EPA was created to deal with very real pollution problems. Let’s not pretend those problems don’t exist, and find a better way to deal with those problems.
Everything’s cleaner than it ever was. It’s all a trade-off. There is no free anything. If you want to have the world’s economy destroy itself, like it is now doing, just keep on with this “nothing is too much for clean air” bullshit.
Government has no self-regulating ability. No matter how many redundant layers of “accountability” you add to the leviathan, it will always grow out of control.
See how smart those Founders were, now? And how stupid FDR’s Brain Trust really was?
Your health will really suck when you’re living in a mud hut using cow pies for heat.
Dolt!