'Smoking Gun' Turns into Big Em-Barrasso-ment for GOP

When Obama administration officials reviewed the EPA’s proposed finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare, some asked for more details about the science and questioned the costs to U.S. businesses.

Those comments, compiled in a memo as part of the standard interagency review process, were intended to be suggestions for the EPA to consider before formalizing the endangerment finding later this year.

This morning, however, that memo ended up in the hands of Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who waved it about at a Capitol Hill hearing on the EPA’s budget and declared it “a smoking gun.”

“It really appears to me that the decision was based more on political calculation than on scientific ones,” Barrasso told EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who was testifying about her agency's budget.

That might be what Barrasso, whose No. 1 campaign contributor is a coal company, wants to read into the Office of Management and Budget memo, but that isn't what the memo says.

Here’s what Budget Director Peter Orszag wrote after Barrasso's "smoking gun" began appearing in media reports:

Media reports today are suggesting that OMB has found fault with EPA’s proposed finding that emissions of greenhouse gases from motor vehicles contribute to air pollution that endangers public health and welfare. Any reports suggesting that OMB was opposed to the finding are unfounded.

The quotations circulating in the press are from a document in which OMB simply collated and collected disparate comments from various agencies during the inter-agency review process of the proposed finding.

In other words, we simply receive comments from various agencies and pass them along to EPA for consideration, regardless of the substantive merit of those comments. In general, passing along these types of comments to an agency proposing a finding often helps to improve the quality of the notice.

Perhaps more importantly, OMB concluded review of the preliminary finding several weeks ago, which then allowed EPA to move forward with the proposed finding. As I wrote on this blog on April 17, the "proposed finding is carefully rooted in both law and science."

The bottom line is that OMB would have not concluded review, which allows the finding to move forward, if we had concerns about whether EPA’s finding was consistent with either the law or the underlying science. The press reports to the contrary are simply false.

The OMB memo isn't signed or dated, and the sources of the specific questions and concerns aren’t identified. A reading of the nine pages clearly shows the nature of the memo to be suggestions for EPA to consider.

Here's one excerpt Barrasso hinted at:

(The TSD [technical support document] notes several areas where essential behaviors of GHGs are "not well determined" and "not well understood" (e.g., why have U.S. methane levels decreased recently?).) This could be remedied by expanding the discussion on pp. 25-31 to articulate more clearly how the Administrator weighed the scientific evidence related to each impact or how/whether she gave more or less weight to particular impacts for either the public health or the welfare finding and how she weighed uncertainty in her deliberations.

Barrasso also seized on this paragraph:

Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the CAA [Clean Air Act] for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities. Should EPA later extend this finding to stationary sources, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulatory programs such as New Source Review.

ABC News, citing an unnamed administration official, reported that that second paragraph was written by "a Bush appointee in the Office of Advocacy in the Small Business Administration."

During the hearing, Jackson patiently repeated for the committee the history behind the proposed endangerment finding.

The finding originated with the Bush administration after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and that it could not refuse to use that authority simply because of policy preferences. The Bush EPA proposed an endangerment finding, but the Bush White House refused to open the email, so it was stuck in cyberlimbo.

“I suspect we will have this discussion several times,” Jackson told the committee.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) also questioned the cost of taking action on climate change – either by EPA regulations or by the threat of EPA regulation forcing Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation – saying he feared it would send jobs overseas and damage the U.S. economy.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) responded to Vitter and repeated her promise that the committee would move climate legislation this year.

"It’s not about whether there’s a recession or a boom in the economy," Boxer said. "The endangerment finding that was made is strikingly similar to that that was made by the Bush administration because the science is so obvious.”

See also:

EPA Issues Endangerment Finding, Increases Pressure on Congress to Act on Climate

How Tom Delay Sparked the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding

Lawyers Advising Clients to Prepare for Economy-Wide GHG Regulation

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