Biden's Top Climate Adviser Sanctioned by Nat'l Academy of Sciences for Ethics Violations

Biden's "party of science" senior climate adviser Jane Lubchenco, got part of her southern anatomy handed to her by the National Academy of Sciences, (NAS) the nation's most prestigious scientific body, for ethical violations.

Lubchenco [aka The Science Lady], the deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was sanctioned on August 8th for violating the NAS' code of conduct. The specific reason she was sanctioned involved a paper she edited that appeared in the NAS' peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2020. However, the paper did not use the latest available data, and The Science Lady HAD A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ONE OF THE RESEARCHERS, in violation of the journal's editorial policies, and a rather unethical thing to do in any case.

Section 3 of the NAS code of conduct states:

NAS members shall avoid those detrimental research practices that are clear violations of the fundamental tenets of research. Members should be fair and objective peer reviewers, maintain confidentiality when requested, promptly move to correct the literature when errors in their own work are detected, include all deserving authors on publications, and give appropriate credit to prior work in citations.

Lubchenco edited an article advocating for the use of particular conservation tools in the global fishing industry. The article was titled: “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” and appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2020. 

However, the article was retracted the following year after it was discovered the researchers used old data in the research, which resulted in a spurious overestimation of their results. This is either a stupid mistake or an attempt to conceal true results.

“[W]e have been informed that the changes to our results arising from the data error have cast doubt over the outcome of the peer review process, ultimately leading to the retraction of this paper,” the researchers said in their retraction note. “We intend to submit a corrected version of the paper elsewhere.”

“The editors also note that the article’s editor, J.L., [aka The Science Lady] recently published a related paper with the article’s authors and has a personal relationship with one of the authors, both of which are disallowed by PNAS editorial policies,” PNAS editor-in-chief Mary Berenbaum wrote in the note. The media outlet, Axios adds that one of the researchers was Lubchenco’s brother-in-law.

Lucky for PNAS, Lubchenco accepted the sanctions, otherwise Biden may have unleashed the FBI on the organization and gone through their financial data.

“I accept these sanctions for my error in judgment in editing a paper authored by some of my research collaborators — an error for which I have publicly stated my regret,” Lubchenco said, via Axios. In February, a group of Republican leaders sent a letter to the Biden administration expressing doubts about the integrity of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in light of Lubchenco’s history and whatever was going on between her and her brother-in-law. 

Does her sister even know?

“We … encourage you to consider if Dr. Lubchenco should continue to be involved in developing a framework for the improvement of agency scientific integrity policies and practices when she has violated the very policies she is tasked with imposing on Federal agencies,” Republican ranking member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Frank Lucas (R-OK), Environment Subcommittee ranking member Stephanie Bice (R-OK), and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ranking member Jay Obernolte (R-CA), wrote in their letter. “If the executive branch cannot or will not uphold the practices of scientific integrity, then Congress will have to assume a greater role in oversight of these matters.”

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Meanwhile, the Inflation Reduction Act will help with the environment because that's the new definition of inflation. Follow the science.

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