“Let me say this clearly. We are not an agency that is about censorship. It is not what we do, it is wrong, it is not who we are.”

—L’Oreal Stepney (2011)

That’s how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s deputy director of the Office of Water responded to allegations by scientists that their conclusions had been censored by her agency, which considers climate change to be “unsettled science.” The TCEQ was accused of censoring facts that appeared to support the contrary.

L’Oreal Stepney countered the criticism by flatly stating that censorship was wrong and was not representative of TCEQ practices.

Less than 24 months after Stepney’s public protestation, a censorship order against this writer was unlawfully coerced from an Arizona judge by TCEQ senior toxicologist Tiffany Bredfeldt with the help of TCEQ Toxicology Director Michael Honeycutt to conceal facts that were potentially embarrassing to them and to the…