Category — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

As more state and other interested parties line-up to contest the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the EPA is becoming creative in trying to come up with other strategies to justify restricting carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gas) emissions.

One new strategy is to use the Clean Water Act to justify curbing CO2 emissions because they lead to ocean acidification (an impact which itself seems to be overblown). Another is to explore seeking greenhouse gas emissions controls at a local level, under the guise that concentrated local CO2 emissions (i.e. in cities) change the local environment in such a way as to elevate human mortality there.

Never mind that such an impact will never be detectable.

My colleague Pat Michaels refers to this as the EPA’s “whack-a-mole” strategy—while effort is concentrated on trying to beat down one of its pesky and ill-founded CO2-regulating proposals, the EPA pops up another and another and another. The EPA hopes that after a while, one mole sneaks through unnoticed and manages to grab the prized (CO2-enriched) carrot.

Currently most of the whacking is aimed at trying to halt EPA’s use of the Clean Air Act as a mechanism for sweeping CO2 regulation. The ocean acidification issue is just starting to get some attention. We have briefly touched on ocean acidification here at MasterResource, and found it to be an issue in which it seems that the more that is known the less of a problem it appears to be (i.e. the real world is a pretty adaptable and responsive place). Hopefully, the EPA’s recently announced solicitation of public comment “on what considerations EPA should take into account when deciding how to address listing of waters as threatened or impaired for ocean acidification” will garner some deserved response before the May 21, 2010 deadline.

In this post, I want to take a look at a novel mole that needs attention: the idea that local CO2 produces any sort of impact on local mortality that could be detectably reduced by local CO2 restrictions.

Background

In taking questions from the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee last year, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson insisted that that EPA needed to retain certain performance based standards setting for new and existing power plants in order to address local pollution. Senator Arlen Specter was amazed, saying there is no localized impact from CO2.

But apparently Jackson knew something that Senator Specter didn’t—the EPA was funding a study that was to conclude that, indeed, local CO2 emissions do raise local mortality in the U.S.—by three one-hundredths of one percent—or by about 792 deaths out of 2,700,000 deaths annually (from these numbers it would seem that Senator Specter wasn’t that far off). [Read more →]

Synopsis: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, by pulling its punches in the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case, granting California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles, and declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate and energy policy for the nation, and amend the Clean Air Act – powers never delegated to EPA by Congress. It is time to rein in this rogue agency. The Congressional Review Act Resolution of Disapproval introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is the way to do it.

When did Congress tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to license California and other states to adopt non-federal fuel economy standards within their borders? When did Congress tell EPA to act as co-equal or even senior partner with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in setting fuel-economy standards for the auto industry?

When did Congress tell EPA to establish climate and energy policy for the nation? And when did Congress tell EPA to “tailor,” that is amend, the Clean Air Act to avoid an administrative debacle of its own making?

The answer, of course, is never, never, never, and never. EPA is flouting federal law and the Constitution. 

Murkowski Resolution: Averting the Regulatory Avalanche

Congress may soon get its first real opportunity to rein in this rogue agency. Sometime between now and May 25th the Senate is expected to vote on Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act (CRA) Resolution of Disapproval. This measure would veto the legal force and effect of EPA’s endangerment finding – the agency’s official determination that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare. If allowed to stand, the endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Clean Air Act.  As explained in previous posts (here, here, and here), America could end up with a regulatory regime far more costly than any climate bill Congress has either rejected or failed to pass, yet without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on it.

By EPA’s own admission, the endangerment finding leads to “absurd results” — administrative burdens that undermine environmental protection, economic growth, and congressional intent. [Read more →]

As a person who likes to stay abreast of our ever-expanding government in my areas of specialization (energy and environment), I periodically survey the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to see what they are funding with my taxpayer dollars.

Imagine my surprise when I encountered a novel Request for Proposals at their National Center for Environmental Research seeking to recruit people at non-profit institutions to dredge through EPA’s databases in order to gin up new new things for the agency to worry about and possibly regulate.

Specifically,

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, is seeking applications proposing to use existing datasets from health studies to analyze health outcomes for which the link to air pollution is not well established, or to evaluate underlying heterogeneity in health responses among subgroups defined by susceptibility or extent and/or composition of exposure.

And, ever helpful, EPA gives some examples of what such data-dredging exercises might look like: [Read more →]

[Editor note: For more background and the likely consequences of EPA's endangerment finding, see Marlo Lewis, "CO₂ Regulation under the Clean Air Act: Economic Train Wreck, Constitutional Crisis, Legislative Thuggery"]

In their recent draft of an endangerment-finding technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased”; the most recent available; and collected by the “best available methods.” The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.

Staff researcher Dr. Alan Carlin, given just a few days to review the draft TSD, took EPA to the woodshed because the report offered little more than a bibliography of out-of-date reports and research rather than a rigorous scientific inquiry into the subject. The Carlin report’s preface clearly shows that the EPA abdicated its position of scientific authority on the subject: “Our conclusions do represent the best science in the sense of most closely corresponding to available observations that we currently know of [and] are sufficiently at variance with those of the IPCC, CCSP, and the Draft TSD that we believe they support our increasing concern that EPA has not critically reviewed the finding by these other groups.”

Both of EPA’s recent attempts to regulate additional pollutants under the Clean Air Act have had poor results. [Read more →]

Now that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced intent to find that greenhouse gas emissions (primarily carbon dioxide) from human activities lead to the “endangerment of public health and welfare,” the question arises: What could EPA theoretically do about it? (I’ll leave the politics to others.) In other words, can a U.S.-side agency conceptually protect U.S. citizens from the endangerment of their health and welfare from the global issue of  global warming?

It turns out that they cannot do much of anything. EPA is simply saber-rattling to get Congress’s attention. If the agency was forced to actually draw their weapon in battle, they would be holding a rubber sword against a massive and growing global force. The bottom line: the EPA is brandishing only about 0.0033ºC/yr-worth of global temperature influence—and that is only if it managed to shut down all greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. economic activity and keep it that way. All the while, the warming pressure from the rest of the world steadily grows, shrinking the EPA’s already too-small-to-matter arsenal.

This can be understood by simplifying the issue down to the Xs and Os—carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures. [Read more →]