Lawsuit Challenges EPA On Greenhouse Finding

This story appears in the Feb. 22 print edition of Transport Topics.

A group including motor carriers, businesses, several members of Congress and a conservative public interest legal foundation has filed a lawsuit in federal appeals court challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, called EPA’s endangerment finding a “power grab” and based on “scientific errors and fraud.”

In upcoming weeks, SLF plans to “supplement and amend” the evidence contained in its lawsuit filed Feb. 12 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, according to the Atlanta-based foundation.

“The scientific basis for the EPA endangerment finding is flawed, based on questionable and potentially fraudulent data, and certainly does not rise to the level of certainty necessary to upend the American economy, toss millions out of work, and which promises little or no climate change benefit over the next half-century,” Shannon Goessling, SLF’s executive director, said in a statement.

EPA officials said that they are “confident” that the agency’s finding issued in December will withstand a legal challenge (click here for previous story).

EPA said that it issued the finding in response to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that the Clean Air Act requires the agency regulate greenhouse gases if it found the emissions pose a danger to the public health of Americans.

The endangerment finding was a required legal step for EPA to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions as soon as 2012.

“The agency made an affirmative finding following an exhaustive review of the peer-reviewed science and thousands of public comments submitted in an open and transparent process,” EPA said in a recent statement.

Also listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against EPA were 13 members of Congress, all Republicans; the Georgia Motor Trucking Association; Kennesaw Transportation Inc.; J&M Tank Lines Inc.; Southeast Trailer Mart Inc.; Collins Trucking Co.; and Horizon Freight System Inc.

“The trucking companies are all from the Southeast,” Goessling told Transport Topics. “They see the detrimental effect that the finding is going to have on their industry and on their businesses.”

“Our objective is for EPA to back off and do the right thing,” said Edward Crowell, president and chief executive officer of the GMTA. “What got us interested are the potential disastrous costs for our members.”

Goessling said the lawsuit was motivated by e-mails made public in December that questioned the reliability of scientific research conducted by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change. Critics have said the “climategate” e-mails have cast doubt on the panel’s research findings, which since have been the subject of two inquiries by IPCC.

“Climategate is just the tip of the iceberg,” Goessling said. “Things are coming out on a daily basis that show there is either fraud involved or at a minimum, there is bad science.”

Goessling said the EPA should “unwind the clock, put the finding on hold, which would allow them to do the objective analysis they should do and not rely on the U.N.’s IPCC.”

“Frankly, the EPA is aware of the deficiencies, they’re aware of the disclosures that are occurring, they are aware of the scientists coming forward and making admissions, and they are aware that the IPCC is rethinking some of its positions,” Goessling said. “When we have a federal agency of the U.S. government acting for policy goals rather than using objectivity and the scientific method to reach its answers, we have a problem.”

But EPA has said that there is a “scientific consensus” that that, as a result of human activities, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are at record high levels, and data show that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years, with the steepest increase in warming in recent decades.

The evidence of human-induced climate change goes beyond observed increases in average surface temperatures; it includes melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans because of excess carbon dioxide, changing precipitation patterns, and changing patterns of ecosystems and wildlife, according to EPA.

The endangerment finding covers emissions of six key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride — that have been the subject of scrutiny and intense analysis for decades by scientists in the United States and around the world.