Transparency is a paramount virtue in science and politics, even more so when those two fields of endeavor overlap, as they do in discussions of climate change.

President Barack Obama repeatedly pledged he would run the most transparent administration in the history of the United States during both of his presidential campaigns, but the evidence shows Obama’s administration has not only failed to meet that standard, it has actively worked to conceal important information from the public.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com joins Environment & Climate News managing editor H. Sterling Burnett to discuss the new oversight report on the spending of the Environmental Protection Agency.

One of the challenges the seemingly never-ending list of Republican presidential candidates must face in what is sure to be an all-out political brawl in 2016 is finding a unique way to explain that America does not have a tax revenue problem; it has a massive spending addiction.

Marching under the banner of “transparency,” there is a growing movement in the U.S. to limit truly free speech. The movement claims to be attacking “dark money,” but the reality is that its adherents want to shut up its ideological opponents. Independent expressions of support or opposition for candidates or political issues are marginalized by irrelevant questions about funding sources. Honest research and well-formulated arguments are denounced as “biased” or “untrustworthy” because of who the donors are rather than based on the merits of the arguments presented.

I think at this point in our collective national existence, “Trust me, I’m a Clinton” isn’t the best defense of one’s actions.

The recently uncovered comments of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber deriding the intelligence of the American voter and bragging that deception helped pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare as it’s more popularly known, have prompted outrage from many conservatives and Republicans.

This ain’t about Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner. It’s about the Obama Administration’s yet again squid ink-like “transparency.”

Transparency, therefore, has little to do with being accountable to the political branches of government. It’s about allaying the concerns of the financial market in the face of accommodative monetary policy.

On its own Apple already plays the environmental consciousness game to pacify its green-minded customers about as well as it can. Hiring Lisa Jackson adds nothing on that count.