EPA’s greenhouse gas science didn’t follow its own peer review procedure, IG says
posted at 12:05 pm on September 28, 2011 by Tina Korbe
The data process used to arrive at the administration’s determination that greenhouse gases endanger “the public health and welfare” violated the Environmental Protection Agency’s own peer review procedure, a new report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General reveals.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, requested this report in April, asking that the OIG determine whether the EPA “followed key federal and Agency regulations and policies in developing and reviewing the technical data used to make and support its greenhouse gases endangerment finding.” Now, Inhofe is calling for a series of hearings to further investigate the IG’s findings.
The Daily Caller’s Caroline May, with more:
“I appreciate the inspector general conducting a thorough investigation into the Obama-EPA’s handling of the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases,” Inhofe said. “This report confirms that the endangerment finding, the very foundation of President Obama’s job-destroying regulatory agenda, was rushed, biased and flawed. It calls the scientific integrity of EPA’s decision-making process into question and undermines the credibility of the endangerment finding.”
Inhofe lambasted the EPA for its failure to adhere to its own rules, outsourcing the science to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and refusing to conduct its own analysis of the science — in the period leading up to its final endangerment finding.
“The endangerment finding is no small matter: Global warming regulations imposed by the Obama-EPA under the Clean Air Act will cost American consumers $300 to $400 billion a year, significantly raise energy prices, and destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is not to mention the ‘absurd result’ that EPA will need to hire 230,000 additional employees and spend an additional $21 billion to implement its [green house gas] regime. And all of this economic pain is for nothing: As EPA Administrator [Lisa] Jackson also admitted before the Environmental and Public Works] committee, these regulations will have no effect on the climate.”
You know what doesn’t cost consumers billions of dollars each year, raise energy prices or destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs? Yep, you guessed it — drilling for natural gas. Just ask the Pennsylvanians who’ve benefited from all the activity surrounding the Marcellus Shale.
Yet the GOP has the rep as the anti-science party? I’ll never understand it.
P.S. You know that big building pictured in the thumbnail to this post? HQ of the EPA? I can’t help but wonder how it’s heated …
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new strategy:warming is real and we must frack!
rob verdi on April 6, 2013 at 5:33 PM
Imagine if we could get all the homes to heat this way instead of electric, better yet get the electric power plants to go this way even, what a shift in the markets that would make.
MarshFox on April 6, 2013 at 5:40 PM
…frack them!
KOOLAID2 on April 6, 2013 at 5:54 PM
As the indispensable Anthony Watts has put it, the US is the only major nation to actually meet the Kyoto emissions standards, without ever actually signing on. And we met it down to a tenth of a percentage point accuracy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/05/usa-meets-kyoto-protocol-without-ever-embracing-it/#more-83474
jwehman on April 6, 2013 at 6:05 PM
Do you want to know where my BIL the tree/lumber grader says the next big source of carbon emissions is coming from? Old growth stands of mature and decaying trees.
Yep.
Better to cull the older ones and use the lumber as opposed to them releasing their sequestered carbon stored during growth.
hawkdriver on April 6, 2013 at 6:08 PM
Did we factor in the drop due to the decrease in energy use by people no longer driving to work because the don’t have jobs? The reduction because these same people have cut back on heating and cooling because they can’t afford it? The reduction in energy use in manufacturing because we’re not doing as much?
Also consider there has been no warming in the last 15 years, so to quote Hillary “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
I’d rather see a rise as an indicator the the country is up and running.
countrybumpkin on April 6, 2013 at 6:10 PM
Watch your back AP: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/04/06/Bangladesh-Islamists-rally-against-atheist-bloggers
davidk on April 6, 2013 at 6:14 PM
A very misleading statement given the fact that many scientists have reached the opposite conclusion. Cherry picking statistical facts didn’t work when trying to portray the election outcome conservatives prayed to find in pre-election polls, and it won’t work with evolutionary or global warming science either.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-science-predictions-prove-too-conservative
bayam on April 6, 2013 at 6:24 PM
Skip it. Like N. Korea, you’ve already lost.
trigon on April 6, 2013 at 6:30 PM
Destroying the economy will do that.
The Rogue Tomato on April 6, 2013 at 6:30 PM
Thanks for the laugh, bam-bam. You warming cultists are a never-ending source of laughter.
Keep it up.
Solaratov on April 6, 2013 at 6:31 PM
Massive props to my home state, PA, which opened up to fracking just before the graph line trended downward. Last year frackers paid out $1 billion in royalties to landowners and $200 million in impact fees to the government. My heating bills are awesomely low.
Sad thing: Ed Rendell (D) was responsible for this when he was Gov. He said “yes” and our R legislature said “of course.”
albo on April 6, 2013 at 6:46 PM
its a metric without any f****** meaning or bearing in reality.
good grief.
tom daschle concerned on April 6, 2013 at 6:47 PM
wasn’t there a story the other day about the epa possibly going after wood burning stoves?
tom daschle concerned on April 6, 2013 at 6:49 PM
Just wait until everyone’s unemployed! Woohoo!
andycanuck on April 6, 2013 at 6:50 PM
So in other words….winters in Omaha are still gonna suck and be way cold.
Global Warming…you…you…flirt you.
By the way, Omaha is nice today and I have not been this warm for….six months.
KirknBurker on April 6, 2013 at 6:53 PM
Erika, you’ll never satisfy the eco-freaks. Those lemmings always have to have something to worry about so that they can continue to dictate to others.
I’m waiting for their next meeting, the one they will all WALK to, leaving their PRIVATE JETS at home.
GarandFan on April 6, 2013 at 7:08 PM
20% real unemployment has a larger effect than the use of natural gas. In addition, emissions don’t tell the whole story. According to the Goracle, there’s enough CO2 already in the air to choke a horse.
BobMbx on April 6, 2013 at 7:27 PM
The largest drop in emissions in 2012 came from coal, which is used almost exclusively for electricity generation…
I gather this clown isn’t aware of how much coal is used by the steel industry.
Steven Den Beste on April 6, 2013 at 7:33 PM
bayam on April 6, 2013 at 6:24 PM
for those who don’t know, Scientific American used to be a very prestigious journal of science. Part of the total co-opting and culture hegemony of the Left has been to take over periodicals like SA wile still representing it as science
While bayam could give a care…the authors of this piece are just two more left wing climate agitators.
the aritcle appeard in Alternet
http://www.alternet.org/environment/climate-risks-have-been-underestimated-last-20-years?paging=off
Scherer is a long time lefty eco-journo (Salon, Grist, etc)
DailyClimate.org is a similar bunch of people
former Greenpeace people…and of course the Rockefeller Brothers fund. Charming bunch of people i’m sure.
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/about
so when bayam comes around waving some fancy sounding article…well, it is just the Voice of the Left
r keller on April 6, 2013 at 7:38 PM
Read Scientific American for decades. Finally had to cancel my subscription because of the unscientific political nonsense.
Gingey on April 6, 2013 at 9:16 PM
Actually, the emissions are falling because the use of gasoline has been tanking throughout our depression: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-06/these-charts-better-not-represent-true-state-us-economy
Bart DePalma on April 6, 2013 at 9:56 PM
I subscribed to SciAm for about 30 years before I gave it up over the overt leftyness. Then they offered a really cheap price to renew for a year at a low enough price they cannot possibly make money on it; so I did but I only read articles so far removed from politics that it would be pointless to slant it.
KW64 on April 6, 2013 at 10:04 PM
Plus the article Bayam links is from December 2012, before the Marcotte scandal.
Here is the first commenter to the piece:
AesopFan on April 6, 2013 at 10:11 PM
Every time we expose the LIE that IS the Bogus “Global Warming” charade – it is GOOD!
williamg on April 7, 2013 at 12:06 AM
You are just another fundamentalist environmental hypocrite. You write your screeds using electrons powered by big energy/oil. Why do you hate the children by using energy sources that produce CO2. If you were really a true believer you’d quit suckling on the teat on big energy.
chemman on April 7, 2013 at 1:38 AM
Something those scientists don’t tell you is that they reached those conclusions without any facts whatsoever. It’s so outrageous that no one would think this is possible. Yet it’s absolutely true. They have never had a single shred of evidence to support AGW. What’s more, 100% of their models have now been found to be flawed. No warming in 20 years will do that.
Those same scientists are now scrambling. As evidence that they’ve been scrambling for a while is when they started blaming warm weather on CO2. They tried to call this “climate disruption”.
AGW was known to be a hoax 20 years ago. It’s still a hoax today. I’m a programmer. I’ve looked at their numbers. They’re so unreliable that the error margins overwhelm any significant data that could exist in their datasets. Said another way, there isn’t enough precision in their data. This is why they’ve refused to get statisticians to look at their data.
MrX on April 7, 2013 at 1:49 AM
Is what climate “scientists” are all about.
Let’s talk about how the hockey sticks are ALWAYS cherry picked data. Hide the decline anyone?
bayam, why do you still refuse to admit that the hockey stick from An Inconvenient Truth has been debunked? Do you admit that the new Marcotte hockey stick was quickly debunked?
blink on April 7, 2013 at 9:00 AM
Why show a pic of water vapor in a story about C02?
Akzed on April 7, 2013 at 9:16 AM
Electric utilities are already moving that way, rapidly. Just one example.
Oldnuke on April 7, 2013 at 9:47 AM
Dr. ZhivBlago on April 7, 2013 at 11:09 AM
Retard the GDP, get lower energy usage and CO2 released.
BTW, climate is pretty much a one sided affair with the unshielded thermonuclear fusion ball 13,000,000,000 times the size of earth 8 light minutes away the driver and our orbit a distant second.
jukin3 on April 7, 2013 at 1:30 PM
Just as much as Hot Air’s continued linking of pictures of steam, to carbon dioxide.
Maybe you can go Full Journalist and post pictures of steam in shadow, to better manipulate low information America?
MNHawk on April 8, 2013 at 8:58 AM