This post is part of the Wonk Room’s exclusive investigation of the private contractors working under BP’s control to respond to the foreign oil giant’s Gulf Coast disaster. The results of the investigation are being tracked at BP’s Contractor Army.

Although the public face of worker medical care has been the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state agencies such as the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, the real work is being done by a private company working for BP and BP’s subcontractors. Anyone seeking treatment by the federal mobile medical unit run by HHS in Venice, LA, is “pre-screened by a private company hired by BP — Acadian Ambulance Services.”

Acadian Companies is an employee-owned company based in Lafayette, LA that runs Acadian Ambulance Service, the largest private rural ambulance service in the nation. Acadian’s subsidiaries — also including the health training service Safety Management Systems, the One Gulf call center, the Acadian Air Med Services helicopter fleet — have been deeply involved in the response to both the BP explosion and the cleanup.

Acadian’s Air Med, the One Gulf Offshore Emergency Call Center and Acadian Ambulance “played a key role in rescue efforts” after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, “transporting 18 of the workers injured in the blast to local New Orleans area and Alabama hospitals.”

As a subcontractor to Oil Mop, Acadian’s Safety Management Systems established a Mobile Medical Command Center in Fourchon headed by Bob Black. Subcontracting to US Environmental Services, Safety Management Systems and Acadian Ambulance established a second Mobile Medical Command Center in Pascagoula, MS. USES have “also contracted SMS paramedics Tony Mooney and Gerald Chauvin on a pair of cleanup vessels based out of Venice, LA.”

In a telephone conversation, Acadian vice president of public relations and marketing Keith Simon refused to answer the Wonk Room’s questions about his company’s activities. Simon cited the incident command structure which he said funnels all information through designated public information officers.

“An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials” has unanimously “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.”

PANEL STICKS UP FOR AN INNOCENT MANN

His work “clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field…. Dr. Mann’s work, from the beginning of his career, has been recognized as outstanding.“

Few if any American climate scientists have been as falsely accused — and thoroughly vindicated — over both their academic practices and scientific results as Dr. Michael Mann.

Today, Penn State issued its final and complete exoneration (click here) of Dr. Michael Mann in the matter of his scientific practices “for proposing, conducting, or reporting research,” primarily related to the famous — and thoroughly vindicated — Hockey Stick.  We can be more confident than ever that the “Earth is hotter now than in the past 2,000 years” (a post which discusses the PNAS study that is the source of the above graph).

And this “Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials” not only exonerated him unanimously, they did so even though one of the scientists they interviewed in the course of their work was the much debunked, shameless defamer of climatologists, Richard Lindzen!

A number of major media outlets owe Mann an apology and retraction:

• Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts
• CBS libels Michael Mann
• Defamatory WSJ piece by Jeffrey Ball and Keith Johnson

If the disinformer-friendly Sunday Times can retract and apologize for its shameful and bogus Amazon story smearing the IPCC, surely Newsweek, CBS, and the WSJ can.

UPDATE:  The WashPost has a flawed story on the exoneration that typifies how the media has blown the coverage of the stolen emails, discussed at the end.

Let’s back up and start with Mann’s scientific work — that’s what the anti-science crowd has been trying to undermine all these years.  If Mann were an astrophysicist publishing papers on black holes, none of this would’ve happened.  The disinformers have been desperate to prove that recent human-caused warming is not unusual and is not indicative of an important and dangerous trend — but it is.  As climatologist and one-time darling of the contrarians Ken Caldeira said last year, “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

The key point about Mann’s “Hockey Stick” work is that it was repeatedly attacked and utterly vindicated long before we saw any of the trumped up charges around the stolen emails:

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[I'd be very interested in the comments of other Brits upon watching the video.  UK readers who want to make a complaint to the BBC will find contact info below.]

The BBC’s climate journalism has declined in recent months (see BBC asks CRU’s Phil Jones the climate version of “When did you stop beating your wife”).  It just hit a new low in the half hour show, “What’s up with the Weather?”

All you need to know about how distorted and sensationalistic the BBC’s worldview has become is to read how BBC’s News editors describe the show:

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Barry Wong (R-AZ), a candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission “” which is responsible for final decisions on granting or denying utility rate adjustment, among other things “” wants to save utility customers from future rate hike by shutting off the power, and other utilities, to undocumented immigrants.  Wonk Room has the “just when you think they can’t get any nuttier or more heartless” story.

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Numerous media outlets seized on a dubious January London Sunday Times report which claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 statement on Amazon rain forests was “unsubstantiated” and without scientific basis in order to attack the IPCC’s credibility and global warming science in general. However, The Sunday Times has now retracted that claim, noting, “In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence.” Will these media outlets follow suit?

Media Matters has written a terrific post identifying the media outlets that need to issue retractions on the shameful and bogus Amazon story smearing IPCC.  It is reposted below:

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20 Solar Cell Prototypes That Could Change the Future

How cool would it be to have your office walls generating energy from ambient light to power your devices? OK, we know offices are a thing of the past, but this prototype could be useful for any kind of office (home work spaces, co-working venues). Designed by Jenny Redd from the California College of Arts, it can be produced with current technology.

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I discussed last month whether people should boycott BP gas stations.   Many Americans are doing so, and BP — whose recklessness and hubris has devastated the Gulf community the company claims to care about — is responding disingenuously.  TP has the story.

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Says of GOP, “ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office.”

Back in October, Steven Hayward, “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” wrote: “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.”

A similar point was just made by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) — or made that should be Sen. Bob Bennett (RUT).  TP has the story:

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