Heartburn over an inspector general's report at the US Environmental Protection Agency underscores determination of a rogue agency to regulate.
It does not, as some have suggested, repudiate the scientific basis for EPA's finding in December 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and therefore represent pollution subject to federal regulation. With its endangerment finding, EPA claimed authority to restructure energy use and thus to control much of the American economy.
At the request of Sen. James Inhofe (D-Okla.), one the agency's loudest congressional critics, the EPA IG studied handling of technical information supporting the decision. The IG found problems. In a Sept. 26 report it called EPA's technical support document (TSD) a "highly influential scientific assessment"—a description triggering requirements for reviews more rigorous than those that occurred.
EPA told the IG it didn't see TSD as influential enough to warrant more-stringent review. The agency and its IG thus disagree about significance of the document. The IG didn't judge whether information in the TSD supported the endangerment finding. EPA's position is untenable. It offered the TSD in support of a regulatory expansion historic in scope and likely to be very costly. How can any document underlying such a lunge by government be anything less than supremely significant?
For EPA, though, stricter review would have been inconvenient. The TSD contained the standard argument for radical defenses against global warming: Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and raising global average temperature, melting glaciers and making sea levels rise, aggravating weather extremes, and changing "physical and biological systems;" phenomena other than human activity don't explain the effects; catastrophe looms. That scenario has its doubters. Stricter review of the TSD would have evoked a comment from them. But EPA is too busy regulating to worry about dissent. In a Sept. 28 press statement, the IG, Arthur A. Elkins Jr., said, "EPA disagreed with our conclusions and did not agree to take any corrective actions in response to this report."
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Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.
