Clean Power Plan Must Go Say Scientists

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H. Sterling Burnett

Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News at The Heartland Institute

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute. Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, most recently as a senior fellow in charge of NCPA’s environmental policy program. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations, including serving as a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission.

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A group of 65 scientists and public health experts have joined a growing chorus of voices calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to review and withdraw its endangerment finding for carbon dioxide, the naturally occurring, invisible, non-toxic, greenhouse gas emitted by all living beings that is critical to all life on earth.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Science and Environmental Policy Project submitted a petition signed by more than 60 noted scientists and public health experts calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its finding carbon dioxide is a danger to public health and the environment. In the October 17 letter, the authors write:

The Endangerment Finding is the basis for a host of incredibly burdensome and wide-ranging regulations, [that] … threaten access to affordable energy, as well as millions of jobs, and countless lives around the world. The finding has been used by other federal agencies to greatly expand their own regulatory programs, while other nations and international groups have relied on it to justify their own restrictions on affordable energy.

The Endangerment Finding needs to be reexamined to ensure U.S. energy policy is based on sound science.

The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council had previously petitioned EPA to withdraw the endangerment finding and endorsed these scientists’ letter, writing in a press release:

recent research has definitively validated that: once certain natural factor (i.e., solar, volcanic and oceanic/ENSO activity) impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no ‘natural factor adjusted’ warming remaining to be attributed to rising atmospheric [carbon dioxide] levels. That is, these natural factor impacts fully explain the trends in all relevant temperature data sets over the last 50 or more years. At this point, there is no statistically valid proof that past increases in atmospheric [carbon dioxide] concentrations have caused what have been officially reported as rising, or even record setting, global average surface temperatures.

Qualified scientists are speaking out concerning the lack of justification for the endangerment finding. Will EPA listen?