EPA Ruling Possibly Linked to Climategate Scandal

Republican Senate members are looking for Pres. Obama to rescind the decision by the EPA that carbon dioxide is dangerous to humans says Newsmax:

Republicans and conservative think tanks are calling for the Obama administration to revoke its declaration that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant subject to EPA regulation on the grounds that the EPA’s primary source of information for the finding was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the source of the highly controversial “Climategate” e-mails.

Human Events says that the EPA decision was an attempt to pressure the Senate to passing the cap-and-trade bill, where it is held up:

Monday’s declaration by the Environmental Protection Administration that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health is apparently a regulatory fraud. It was made after EPA regulators refused to consider a report from a leading EPA scientist rejecting the theory that emission of greenhouse gases causes global warming.  

The EPA’s highly-publicized action declared, “…GHGs [greenhouse gases] are the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.”  

The EPA declaration was puffed to the media as the way the Obama administration could impose limits on carbon dioxide emissions despite the fact that its “cap and trade” bill — which passed the House earlier this year — remains stalled in the Senate. It was obviously intended to increase pressure on the Senate to pass the House “cap and tax” bill and to give Obama leeway in Copenhagen to promise — perhaps even agree to treaty limitations — on U.S. carbon emissions.

A Daily News editorial says the decision is a “coup d’etat:”

In the first place, regulation can be challenged in a way that laws cannot. So the EPA’s proposed ruling on so-called “Greenhouse Gases” can be opposed extensively with litigation, to the point that the ruling might not yet be in force when Obama demits office. In the second place, the EPA is funded by Congress. So, if the Agency is being used to bypass or neuter Congress, why should legislators not play hardball and retaliate by cutting off its funding? The EPA may look formidable, but its situation is rather as if Rommel were buying the fuel for his tanks from the Allies.

But what is of compelling interest on this side of the pond is the way in which the bullets to shoot down American democracy were made in Britain. The trail is not hard to follow. When the EPA published its “Endangerment Finding” on greenhouse gases and proposed rule, back in April, almost every paragraph of the text (Federal Register, April 24, 2009, pp 18886-18910) cited as authority the IPCC’s 2007 Report, which the Agency acknowledges it “relies on most heavily”. And whence came the main input on climate change to that report?