CEI Demands EPA Stop Plans to Regulate Greenhouse Gases in Wake of Climategate Fraud

CEI Demands EPA Stop Plans to Regulate Greenhouse Gases
in Wake of Climategate Fraud
EPA Poised to Issue Economy-Killing Energy Regulations‘

Washington, DC, December 3, 2009 – In the wake of the burgeoning Climategate fraud scandal, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on December 2 filed an emergency petition demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency stop its plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, pending a complete investigation.

The purpose of the filing is to “put EPA on notice that new information has very recently been released, whose content is so grave that it may well destroy EPA’s scientific basis for an Endangerment Finding.”  The petition urges EPA to reopen its proceeding and engage in a full examination of this information, accompanied by public comment.

“The petition points out that if the explosive information associated with the Climategate e-mails was serious enough to cause the departure of the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), then it also justifies EPA’s reopening its proceeding,” said Sam Kazman, CEI General Counsel, who filed the emergency petition. 

The information contained in the email conversations disclosed on November 19 raises new questions and doubts about the scientific basis for the Kyoto climate treaty, the successor treaty to be negotiated later this month in Copenhagen, the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer energy-rationing bills, the EPA’s proposed finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare, and other related EPA regulatory proposals.

On October 5, CEI initially petitioned EPA to reopen the Endangerment Proceeding because of a shocking disclosure by the CRU that it had destroyed the raw data for its data set of global surface temperatures.

“These new revelations of scientific fraud and manipulation of data from the CRU are much more damning than what was known in October.  The EPA needs to take another look at the dubious scientific case for global warming alarmism underlying their proposed regulation,” said Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy.

> View the CEI petition to the EPA