Whoa. What? A university professor is being served a subpoena because of his research, and he rams the server’s car?
Let’s try and unpack this…
Back in ’12 you find this article, in which an economist dumps all over a paper Dismukes (a director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies) wrote. The paper purports to demonstrate that so-called legacy lawsuits, where individuals sue oil companies for damage they may have done to their land, cost citizens of Louisiana “30,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in wages over the past eight years.” The paper is waved all over the state by the oil companies as they seek to make it more difficult for people to file these sorts of lawsuits.
Testifying in front of the state legislature on the question of amending filing procedures, the economist, W. Ed Whitelaw, said:
[T]he analysis omits a relevant variable. Dismukes included data from 2005 and 2006, when the Louisiana energy industry was battered by two hurricanes, and stops his analysis in 2007.
“He fails to mention Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita anywhere in the report,” Whitelaw said.
“In our opinion, the Dismukes document fails to meet … professional standards. And this failure matters to the degree that the Dismukes document is fatally flawed, both theoretically and empirically. Nowhere does Dr. Dismukes present a coherent economic model linking legacy lawsuits and decisions to drill in Louisiana.”
Ah c’mon. Just a couple itty bitty hurricanes…
And turns out not only do the oil people really like this study; it’s their study.
Dismukes’ emails, obtained through a public records request by the state and the Vermilion Parish School Board, show a study he authored in 2012 used data given to him by Exxon Mobil, distorted facts to support his thesis and purposely concealed oil companies’ involvement in his research… The emails show the involvement of the Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corporation in Dismukes’ research, and he said in an email given to The Daily Reveille that he was under pressure to produce the report. In another email, he said he wasn’t sure how he would “fess-up” to where some of the information used in his study came from because it was provided by an oil company.
If the server comes at Dismukes again, will he ram again? Stay tuned.