EPA Refuses to Reconsider Harmful Energy Regulations

Washington, D.C., July 30, 2010 – The EPA Thursday rejected petitions to reconsider the agency’s move to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a “public endangerment” under the Clean Air Act.  CEI and others had petitioned EPA last year to reconsider its finding, especially in light of the ClimateGate scandal, which exposed communications from top global warming scientists on how they hid or muddled certain data.

CEI condemned this latest move by the EPA, which will result in massive energy regulations on American citizens and businesses.

“EPA’s denial of petitions for reconsideration was as predictable as EPA’s outsourcing of its scientific judgment to the Climategate schemers at the IPCC,” said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. “This sort of bureaucratic self-dealing is inevitable when one and the same agency gets to determine the science and then regulate based on that determination.”

“EPA now has an even more difficult argument to make to prove it has proceeded reasonably in declaring carbon dioxide ‘endangers’” human health and the environment,” said Horner.  “EPA’s decision is already highly vulnerable, thanks to the agency’s admitted outsourcing of its statutory obligation to assess the science — largely to the UN IPCC, a political body that admits it performs no scientific research — despite a statutory requirement that it is required by law to undertake its own assessment,” said Christopher Horner, CEI Senior Fellow.

“EPA’s action won’t improve the agency’s case in arguing that it proceeded in other than an arbitrary and/or capricious way,” Horner concluded.

> Read more on the EPA endangerment finding