CEI Petitions EPA on Endangerment Finding
On February 17, 2017, CEI petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to begin a reevaluation of its 2009 “Endangerment Finding.” This finding is EPA’s formal ruling on the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming and the environment. It has become the basis for a host of incredibly burdensome and wide-ranging regulations, ranging from auto fuel economy standards to EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other aspects of the “war on coal.” The Endangerment Finding has also been used by other federal agencies to greatly expand their own regulatory programs, while other nations and international groups have relied on it to justify their own restrictions on affordable energy.
Since 2009, a number of EPA’s basic claims have become increasingly questionable:
- While EPA claimed that changes in global temperature in recent decades were highly unusual, new research indicates the opposite.
- The growing body of satellite and balloon data demonstrates that the atmosphere is far less sensitive to CO2 than predicted by the climate models that EPA relied on.
- While atmospheric CO2 increased by about 10 percent since 1998, there’s been no statistically significant increase in global temperatures from 1998 to 2016, despite newspaper headlines about allegedly record-setting yearly temperatures.