On June 23, 2009, The Heartland Institute urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed “Endangerment Finding” for emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles. Heartland submitted Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change in opposition to this proposed rule as well as a 68-page legal analysis by Maureen Martin, Heartland’s senior fellow for legal affairs.

The specific issue involved is whether the EPA Administrator should make a positive finding that six greenhouse gases “cause” or “contribute to” “air pollution” that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act. This proposed finding has ramifications well beyond this rulemaking because it will trigger a cascade of regulation of these greenhouse gas emissions under other sections of the act.

Federal law prohibits enactment of regulations that are unreasonable or arbitrary and capricious. The law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is (1) “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased,” (2) the most recent available, and (3) collected by the “best available methods.” EPA’s proposal violates all of these requirements.

EPA’s proposal relies almost entirely on the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which include data only through 2006 and which are thoroughly discredited in Climate Change Reconsidered.

EPA failed to consider the vast body of peer-reviewed academic research cited in Climate Change Reconsidered. That research demonstrates, among other things, that EPA bases the regulation on computer models that are incapable of accurately simulating past temperatures and thus cannot be used to predict future temperatures. EPA admits there are substantial uncertainties in these models.

EPA’s contentions that the global warming of the twentieth century was caused by human activity and that human emissions will cause future warming are undermined by an extensive body of scientific research pointing to natural forcings and feedback effects that are not taken into account by computer models. Some of these forcings and effects are sufficiently large to entirely explain the warming of the twentieth century or to entirely offset any human effect due to carbon dioxide emissions. Similarly, extensive observational data contradict EPA’s contentions that there has been a human effect on the rate at which glaciers have melted since the last Ice Age, sea levels have risen, or precipitation has increased or become more extreme. EPA also fails to consider research by solar scientists who find temperatures correlate more closely with solar cycles than with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

To read the Heartland comment, follow the link below. Also below are links to comments filed by other organizations.

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