EPA Follows the Science, Denies Climate Deniers' Petition

EPA today denied petitions from a rogue’s gallery of climate deniers who had asked the agency to reconsider its scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the environment. The list of petitioners is not exactly a who’s who of scientific experts:

Coalition for Responsible Regulation, Commonwealth of Virginia, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Ohio Coal Association, Pacific Legal Foundation, Peabody Energy Company, Southeastern Legal Foundation, State of Texas, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and one private citizen.

Nonetheless, the EPA staff was required to spend countless hours carefully reviewing all the claims in order to formally respond to the petitions. One good thing that came out of this exercise is an excellent EPA fact sheet that lays waste to the deniers’ arguments. Here is a sample:

• Petitioners asserted that some scientists’ discussion in private CRU e-mails undermines the credibility of the temperature record. After careful review of all of the e-mail statements (not just the ones highlighted by petitioners), EPA finds nothing in the e-mails that calls into question the validity of the data or of CRU’s analysis. To the contrary, analysis of the e-mails shows scientists working through the problems involved in compiling large datasets.
• Petitioners claim that new studies not previously considered contradict key conclusions in the Endangerment Finding. EPA examined each of these new studies and documented that they neither undermine the key scientific findings nor change the scientific basis for the Endangerment Finding.
• Petitioners claimed that recently found and alleged errors in IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report undermine IPCC’s credibility, and by extension, EPA’s use of the report as a reference document. EPA has carefully reviewed each of the alleged errors. Collectively, they are minor and have no bearing on the Endangerment Finding, are not relied on by EPA to support the Finding, and most are not even errors. The two factual errors in a document the size of IPCC’s 3,000-page Fourth Assessment Report do not substantiate petitioners’ claim that IPCC science, as a whole, is not credible.

Much more detail is available on EPA’s web site for anyone to evaluate for themselves—over 350 pages containing specific responses to each of the petitioners’ claims.

EPA is in good company in finding that the climate deniers’ claims are baseless. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has recently reaffirmed that global warming is occurring, is caused mainly by heat-trapping pollution, and poses a serious danger to the United States. Meanwhile five independent review panels also examined the stolen emails cited by the petitioners and reached the same conclusion as EPA—nothing in the emails calls into question the validity of the data upon which EPA based its original finding.

Unfortunately the carbon polluters and their ideological allies won’t be deterred by science, no matter how well-grounded EPA’s finding. They will continue to throw every obstacle they can in the way of progress, as they did in their sneak attack on the Clean Air Act last week. Lisa Jackson will need all the help she can get to be able to do her real job: protecting public health and the environment.

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