Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s Tuesday’s example, straight from the GOP press release:
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several relevant studies in its decision-making record for a major finding on climate policy after it was made public that a senior EPA official suppressed the scientific evidence for apparently political reasons.
“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach,” said Rep. Sensenbrenner, the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “ . . .
This is actually an old story, which has been debunked as many times as the urban myths about alligators in the sewers. (For example, take a look at this June posting in Grist.) But apparently Sensenbrenner and Issa don’t have anything better to do with their time than recycle discredited stories.
As EPA made clear months ago, the individual in question is in an economist, but his comments weren’t about economics, they were about climate science — a subject on which he has as much professional expertise as my cat. His professional expertise as an economist was completely irrelevant as a matter of law – EPA isn’t allowed to consider cost at all in determining whether a pollutant endangers human health. That’s a scientific issue, not an economic one. The likelihood that he would contribute anything worthwhile to EPA’s findings about climate science was approximately zero anyway, and he might well have been reprimanded for wasting time rather than sticking to his job.
Notwithstanding his lack of any relevant expertise, however, EPA was more than generous in providing him a forum. His comments were submitted to the EPA endangerment team; and his manager allowed his general views on the subject of climate change to be heard and considered inside and outside the EPA and presented at conferences and at an agency seminar. In short, there’s just nothing here at all except EPA leaning over backwards to be tolerant toward an employee’s amateur hobbyhorse. Finally, his manager had enough of him wasting time and told him to get back to his day job.
If there’s a story here, it seems to be EPA’s tolerance of internal dissent, even when the dissenter has little or no credibility.
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Daniel Farber | September 16, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s Tuesday’s example, straight from the GOP press release: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several […]
William Andreen | September 16, 2009
Sunday’s New York Times article about the neglect of our clean water laws included a shocking example of how a regulatory gap in the Clean Water Act can harm public health. For example, the article referred to water supplies in parts of the Farm Belt that are contaminated by dangerous levels of pesticides, which originate […]
William Andreen | September 15, 2009
Sunday’s New York Times article about the neglect of our clean water laws came as a timely reminder that, no matter how well articulated our environmental laws may be, it takes consistent, vigorous enforcement to ensure compliance with these statutory regimes. Unfortunately, as the article illustrates, state and federal enforcement of the Clean Water Act […]
Matt Shudtz | September 14, 2009
Granite, like most natural stones, contains radioactive material. While this isn’t much of a concern for a person who spends a few hours in a kitchen with granite countertops every day, new research by David Bernhardt, Linda Kincaid, and Al Gerhart suggests that the workers who fabricate those countertops might have reason to worry. When […]
Kirsten Engel | September 11, 2009
Five State Attorneys General sent a letter to the Senate leadership on August 31st urging the Senate to enact strong climate legislation. The AGs letter is unusual in that states directly lobbying Congress on the details of federal legislation is a fairly infrequent phenomenon in and of itself. The AGs from California, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, […]
Holly Doremus | September 11, 2009
This item cross-posted by permission from Legal Planet. EPA today announced that it would review 79 pending applications for Clean Water Act section 404 permits for surface coal mining projects in Appalachia (hat tip: Coal Tattoo). This review is good news, and an indication that EPA may be developing a backbone with respect to the […]
Shana Campbell Jones | September 10, 2009
Today at 12:30pm the Federal Leadership Committee released, pursuant to President Obama’s Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration Executive Order, seven draft reports to improve Bay restoration. Each report is about 50 pages, so there’s a lot of information to take in – from strengthening water quality to strengthening storm water management to assessing the impacts […]
Yee Huang | September 10, 2009
On Tuesday the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on the status of state and federal agriculture policies for five Chesapeake Bay watershed states: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The report focuses on agriculture policies that impact water quality and highlights a gaping hole in the regulation of animal-based operations. Past and […]
Rena Steinzor | September 10, 2009
After weeks of sustained attack from the right-wing on issues that are marginal to the job the President asked him to do, Cass Sunstein has emerged from the nomination process bloody but apparently unbowed (here's this afternoon's roll call). He is now the nation’s “regulatory czar,” Director of the White House OMB Office of Information and […]