Better late than never. With the announcement that the EPA will reverse its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act, the agency is righting a grievous wrong committed by the Obama administration.
A watchdog organization, Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO), reviewed the finding, under which the EPA gave itself the authority to regulate carbon – a basic element in all life on Earth – by claiming it was a pollutant, and called it a “product of a sham regulatory process and [violation of] Due Process.” GAO said the finding was “unlawfully predetermined” and it urged the EPA to revisit it.
The regulation promulgated by the hubris of Obama’s EPA has been the foundation of the climate change regulatory regime that created and enriched a new economic sector with an interest in maintaining climate panic. But for most Americans it represented government overreach on steroids.
The endangerment finding came in the early months of the Obama administration, but it was cooked up long before in coordination with environmental activist special interests and privately referred to among agency personnel as a “decision ready to go.” The EPA was picking carpet for all the extra office space it would need before the analysis began.
These were true believers, uninterested in scientific proof and impatient with – even contemptuous of – the normal rulemaking procedures. The deadlines they set were artificial, not scientific or procedural.
According to a Daily Caller report, “Obama EPA officials were hoping to announce the Endangerment Finding proposal ahead of Earth Day, internally flagging concerns over missing the self-imposed deadline related to ‘domestic and foreign criticism [that] would begin immediately and mount steadily,’ according to a memorandum for Obama attributed to former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, dated March 2009.”
(Setting symbolic yet otherwise artificial deadlines, be they Earth Day for the endangerment finding or Sept.11, 2021, for complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, is a terrible way to conduct the nation’s business. As is worrying about “foreign criticism.”)
Documents obtained by my organization, Protect the Public’s Trust, contain a memo from Jackson (using her fake email account under the name Richard Windsor) to endangerment finding advocate Lisa Heinzerling on Feb. 8, 2009, that states, “We expect to be able to issue a proposed finding of endangerment for greenhouse gases within the next 100 days. Within the same document, we expect to find that certain major categories of greenhouse gases – in particular, motor vehicles – cause or contribute to air pollution (GHG emissions) which endangers public health and welfare.” At that point, the administration was 18 days old.
Just a few days later, Jackson wrote to Heinzerling, “… we should all be celebrating together tomorrow, and the Green Group meeting should be cause for a group hug. Have a good night.”
Had the agency and its special interest collaborators allowed more than a pretense of science-driven rulemaking, the ridiculousness of calling carbon – a basic building block of every living thing on the planet – a pollutant might have struck the public. Had the public understood the dubious science underpinning the massive bureaucratic overreach into every nook and cranny of their lives that this spawned, they might have put a crimp in the activists’ plans.
But the activists at EPA rammed the finding through, creating the first and most important piece in the artifice of climate panic. The Trump administration has already canned the previous iterations of the National Climate Assessment, the supposed “crown jewel” of climate science. It was outsourced to a climate consulting firm (not exactly a neutral arbiter) and, as we pointed out in a letter to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was plagued by criticism for using unrealistically dire assumptions in its forecasts.
The administration also shelved the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “Billions Project.” It was a climate propaganda generator that purported to put a cost on weather disasters. But it had an ever-changing and barely discernable methodology, and its figures were hugely inflated over those of the National Hurricane Center. I’m proud to say that PPT played a role in highlighting these and other dishonest and suspect climate schemes.
Big Climate has howled at these corrections. But the fact is that the very people who demand we “follow the science” are the first to discard science that doesn’t further their predetermined, ideologically acceptable outcomes. The 2009 endangerment finding was not spurred by science. It was an end-run around the process by which rules are made in a democratic republic. Good riddance.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Photo: mccready/Flickr)
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