By Chris Reed

As soon as I heard EPA chief Lisa Jackson was leaving, I took to Twitter to predict state air board chair Mary Nichols would be considered a hot candidate for the job, as she was in 2008. When the San Francisco Chronicle got around to this angle Saturday, I expected the usual cheerleading. Instead, lo and behold, it acknowledged the Hien Tran scandal that I broke after being tipped off by UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom — and the Chronicle framed it as the worst thing to happen on her watch:

“Either way, if nominated, it’s likely we’ll hear about some of the not-so-great air board moments under her leadership. Among those is how she handled a researcher whose work supported a major diesel exhaust regulation and who was found to have lied about his scientific credentials.

“Nichols didn’t tell all of the board members about the falsification before they voted to approve a regulation based on his research. Also, he was never fired.”

I began writing about this story in December 2008. When I established that Hien Tran didn’t have the Ph.D. he claimed from UC Davis, it was the lead item on Rough & Tumble one afternoon. Afterwards, it disappeared from California’s mainstream media for a few months, even as I broke the news that the degree Tran presented the air board with was a mail-order Ph.D. from Thornhill University, a diploma mill associated with, yes, a fugitive pedophile.

Thankfully, in March 2009, Lois Henry of the Bakersfield Californian started writing great columns that did a powerful job of demolishing Tran’s rotten science. John and Ken had me on to talk about the scandal and eventually even gave James Enstrom a platform to explain how he figured out Tran’s deceit.

Finally, after a September 2009 air board meeting at which the full governing board was confronted with evidence of Tran’s fraud, did the bleep begin to hit the fan.

Finally, Mary Nichols was held to account for keeping the Tran scandal from a majority of the board even as it voted for highly controversial diesel emission rules based on his work.

Even then, it still took a month for the mainstream media to tackle the story, and when they did, Dan Walters wrote a dishonest column excusing Sacramento journalists for not taking the scandal seriously a year earlier when I broke it.

But now it could cost Nichols an EPA seat. The story of how Tran kept his job while Enstrom got fired for rocking the boat would be riveting at a Senate hearing — and the background information is plentiful on the web.

Yo, Mary: karma time!

By Chris Reed

The nervousness is growing in Bakersfield as the California High-Speed Rail Authority moves toward locking into a route that will disrupt the lives of thousands of people — and maybe for no reason.

The rail line into and through Bakersfield won’t be built in the first bullet-train segment that is supposed to begin construction in 2013. And there is vast reason to think the second segment will never be built because the state government is cash-strapped and the federal government is unlikely to borrow billions and billions for high-speed rail for one and only one state.

So what happens? Something reasonable.  As Bakersfield Californian columnist Lois Henry reports, there is growing interest in a “time out” to resolve unsettled issues and unanswered questions:

“[It] would give the authority, city and other groups time to come up with a more amenable alignment and avoid lawsuits. Court action is almost certain if the pending EIR is certified with its current proposed route cutting through downtown Bakersfield on an 80-foot elevated track in some places.

“Most importantly, a time-out for property owners would mean we wouldn’t have a certified EIR looming over our heads making it impossible to sell our homes or businesses for any decent money and with no prospect of the state buying us out either.

“‘Why select a route and set it in stone when you don’t know when, or even if, you’ll have the money to go all the way into Bakersfield?’ asked Ahron Hakimi, director of the Kern Council of Governments, which oversees transportation projects in Kern.”

But Henry’s conclusion is that a time out isn’t likely for the worst possible reason imaginable. She notes that authority officials refuse to engage on the issue, and then cites a very sharp observation by Jeff Taylor of the Save Bakersfield Committee:

“‘But what would happen if they said this was a reasonable request?’ he wondered. ‘They’d basically be admitting to the fact that it was poorly planned. And what would that say about the rest of their plan, which also sucks?'”

We’ve heard of “too big to fail.” We’ve heard of bureaucratic inertia keeping stupid projects chugging toward completion. But with the California bullet train, we are witnessing a new kind of government fiasco: Fanatics who have to pretend their plan is perfect, because if they acknowledge any of the big flaws — such as the absurdity of throwing a city into upheaval for a rail line that may never come to pass — than all of a sudden the whole thing looks ridiculous.

$69 billion project. About $10 billion in hand. No prospects for the rest.

What the hell, let’s paralyze Bakersfield anyways.