In a segment about the Environmental Protection Agency's announcement that it will issue an endangerment finding allowing it to regulate greenhouse gases, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy brought up a GOP press conference that he claimed was about “a bombshell internal EPA report that showed that the White House was interfering with the EPA's investigators who were looking into the effects of carbon dioxide.” He also aired a clip of Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas saying:

“They [EPA scientists] were told point blank, the decision's already been made at the White House, we're gonna move forward with this, your report's not helpful, in fact it's harmful. Stop working on it. Now I have a copy of that report, I'm sure Mr. Sensenbrenner and Mr. Issa, we can provide it to anybody in this room, and it clearly, just a casual review of this report shows that they had made a predetermined decision to issue the endangerment finding, to heck with what the facts are.”

According to Nexis transcripts, Barton also said, “There is a suppressed report that we've been able to get a copy of and Mr. [Darrell] Issa [R-CA] has done yeoman's work on this, and Mr. [Jim] Sensenbrenner [R-WI], that we'll be using in the future. It's an internal EPA report that shows that it's way too early to issue a public health endangerment finding.... The group within the EPA that was supposed to go out and verify issued a report that was suppressed and they were told, point blank, the decisions have already been made at the White House, we're going to move forward with this, your report is not helpful, in fact, it's harmful, stop working on it.”

Barton is presumably referring to the conspiracy the right-wing hatched last June about the agency suppressing EPA “scientist” Alan Carlin's dissenting report on climate change. The right-wing blog Human Events certainly seems to think so, reporting today that Carlin's March 16 report “was disclosed by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) at a Tuesday afternoon press conference in which he said that the report was not considered by EPA in reaching its Monday determination.”

But the idea that the EPA suppressed Carlin's report has been repeatedly debunked -- the EPA said Carlin was not a scientist and was never asked to work on the endangerment finding, but that nonetheless, his opinions would be incorporated. Sure enough, Carlin is listed as one of the “authors and contributors” to the technical report the EPA issued yesterday supporting the finding.

But Fox & Friends ran with it anyway; as Doocy was speaking, the following on-screen graphics appeared, despite the fact that no information provided by Fox & Friends, nor anything in Barton's remarks, supports the graphics' claim that “an EPA scientist ”admit[ted] findings were fraudulent," or that the White House “interfered” with any of EPA's actual scientific research.

For days now, the Fox & Friends trio -- Doocy, Gretchen Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade -- have doled out an insane amount of false rhetoric about climate change science. Baited by skeptics who say emails reportedly stolen from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) show that climate change is not happening, the Fox & Friends hosts have repeatedly distorted the emails' content without any regard for facts or context.

But since they can only spin one topic for so many days before it gets old, today they moved on to rehashing the old, debunked, Carlin was “hushed up” claim.