News Reports on Endangerment Finding Petitions to USEPA

dennis- Thanks for noting this:

“This document itself does not convey any judgment or conclusion regarding the question of whether GHGs may be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, as this decision is ultimately left to the judgment of the Administrator.””

Absolutely amazing. Auditing the contract(s) for deliverables might be a good idea as how anyone ever signed off on the qualifier is beyond me- unless they wanted a get of jail free card and the EPA gave it to them!

The basis of the Endangerment Finding was the Technical Support Document, TSD:

“The United (Nations) States Environmental Protection Agency”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/science-papers/originals/the-un-states-epa

The TSD is on P17 onwards, this was all written in 2011, references accordingly:

“This document provides technical support for the endangerment analysis concerning greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that may be addressed under the Clean Air Act. The conclusions here and the information throughout this document are primarily drawn from the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.”

This document itself does not convey any judgment or conclusion regarding the question of whether GHGs may be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, as this decision is ultimately left to the judgment of the Administrator.”

“At a Senate hearing this morning, Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson defended her agency’s recent finding that carbon is a pollutant and minimized the role that data from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change played in that decision.
Jackson defended the IPCC data as still worthwhile, while also arguing that the EPA relied on other data, not just the IPCC’s, for the finding. She refused at one point to directly answer whether the IPCC still represented the best data in climate change science.”

The EPA authors of the Endangerment Technical Support Document are mainly economists and environmental policy specialists, with qualifications like Masters in International Affairs or Public Policy and Management, although there are a couple of chemists, engineers and one meteorologist. Some are also IPCC authors and many are involved in the production of the proposed regulations.

Stratus Consulting Inc. has been built into a sizeable company on the back of extensive consultancy work for the EPA and other agencies, which must run into several hundred million dollars.

“Stratus Consulting has worked with EPA on climate change issues, specifically greenhouse gas emissions, since 1996, said Joel Smith, vice president at Stratus. “We’ve been looking at energy efficiency programs within a number of states,” he said. “We’ve also looked at consequences of climate change and done work on the science of climate change.” But they are not climate scientists.

Joel Smith and a Stratus colleague edited the Endangerment Finding Technical Support Document.
Smith has a BA in Political Science and a Masters in Public Policy. He worked for the EPA from 1984 to 1992, where he was the deputy director of the Climate Change Division. He was a co-editor of EPA’s Report to Congress: “The Potential Effects of Global Climate Change on the United States,” published in 1989.

Reviewers of the Endangerment Finding Technical Support Document included Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA, and contributing editor of the RealClimate blog. IPCC Lead Author and modeller.

Susan Solomon, NOAA Senior Scientist, Co-chair, IPCC Working Group 1, 2002-2008. She is a member of America’s Climate Choices Panel.

Thanks for catching my typo Alan! You are correct the comment was made by David Appell.

You may find a recent post by Roger Andrews of interest:

http://euanmearns.com/the-dream-of-100-renewables-assessed-by-heard-et-al

David Apple thinks the EF is very important to the CIC-

“MANMADE CO2 is a pollutant — a deleterious substance with unwanted side effects.
And the US Supreme Court has ruled it is a pollutant.”

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/03/trumps-rollback-of-epa-overreach-what-no-one-is-talking-about/#comment-241654

David would likely agree that the California Council on Science and Technology report on “California’s Energy Future: The View to 2050” got some of the ramifications of the plan correct on what would be needed to run the society:

…..”Aggressive new efficiency measures could reduce the demand for electricity by about a third, and for fuel by half. Incentives to electrify transportation and heat production would increase the requirement for electricity, but cut fuel demand by yet another third. Even with these measures, by 2050 California would need about twice as much electricity as we use today and still nearly 70 percent of the fuel consumed today…..:

The total commitment necessary to achieve this accelerated pace will require strong societal and policy backing because there are less than 40 years to make a nearly total change-over to the required technology. Essentially, in this time period, every existing building will either be retrofit to higher efficiency standards or replaced”….

http://ccst.us/publications/2011/2011energy.php#sthash.Dv3zHG1D.dpuf

I do hope that David would be ok with me using biomass to heat our house vs following the plan of using electrical power for all of our energy needs. If not he might want to talk to our livestock guard dog about how to optimize a process.

Comment by Alan Carlin: I suspect that Mark may be referring to David Appell rather than David Apple.

Valid way….

It seems important to eliminate the cornerstone of the endangerment finding. Good to refurte and emphasize the lousy science.
Of course, a future liberal government can re-enact more junk.
But the only valud way to address bad science is to teach and rely upon better.

Delingpole has a nice way with words!