Growing Group Petitions EPA to Reconsider Endangerment Finding
Following on the heels of a petition for Judicial Review filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the Dec. 23, 2009, filing of a 28-page petition for reconsideration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) on Feb. 17 filed a third amendment challenging EPA's endangerment finding on carbon dioxide emissions. Included in the supplemental filing are disclosures of scientific errors and potential fraud revealed to the public both before and since the finding in December.
All legal documents and filings, as well as scientific background and reports, are available at www.epalawsuit.org.
A few highlights from the amended petition include:
- “The reliance by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] work is so extensive that revelations that undermine the credibility of the IPCC also inevitably impeach the credibility of the EPA’s endangerment finding....”
- A new report indicating widespread “station drop out” – stations that capture temperature data – in some cases, a 90 percent drop out, which skews temperature data; sampling bias toward warmer temperatures; improper adjustments to data and data manipulation; and, improper siting of temperature stations (in urban areas, for example).
- Clear evidence and public admissions of mischaracterized results from scientific studies skewed to appear to endorse temperature increases – leading to public admissions by IPCC-related leaders of accident, overstatement, and manipulation of data.
- Overt error and potential fraud in IPCC reports promising extreme weather events increasing in frequency and severity; Himalayan glaciers melted by 2035; African crop yields collapse by 50 percent; and, large swaths of Amazon rain forest would become dry savanna grassland.
“On behalf of 15 members of Congress and nearly 20 professional associations and companies and itself, Southeastern Legal Foundation has filed this important amendment to our petition with the EPA to ensure a full and complete record of scientific mistakes, flaws, miscalculations, admissions, and potential fraud by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which the EPA relies completely for its endangerment finding,” said Shannon L. Goessling, SLF executive director and chief legal counsel.
“The reality is that the IPCC reports are crumbling beneath the weight of scientific exposure, and the EPA has tied itself to the IPCC reports lock, stock and barrel,” Goessling added. “The EPA and its Congressional overseers must open the books and reconsider the radical position it has taken on climate change regulations and carbon dioxide emissions – the man-made global warming ship is sinking under the weight of these disclosures.”
In 2009, SLF filed a comprehensive public comment. EPA's failure to investigate evidence that supports leading credible scientists' observations that “global warming”/climate change is not caused by humans (anthropogenic), but is natural, cyclical, and not as extreme as reported by the IPCC, creates significant legal problems for the agency’s regulatory effort, the SLF press release stated.
Petitioners include Georgia lawmakers John Linder, Phil Gingrey, Lynn Westmoreland, Tom Price, Paul Broun, Nathan Deal, and Jack Kingston; Texas lawmakers Joe Barton and Kevin Brady; several agricultural, trucking, and transportation interests.