Trump Officials Have Delayed Finalizing the Repeal of the Agency’s “Endangerment Finding” over Concerns the Proposal Is Too Weak to Withstand a Court Challenge.

by Jake Spring (Washington Post) Trump’s biggest climate rollback stalls over fears it will lose in court -- Trump officials have delayed finalizing the repeal of a landmark legal opinion key to their effort to eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules because of concerns the proposal is too weak to withstand a court challenge, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information.

The EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that greenhouse gases harm public health, establishing the basis for regulating them under the Clean Air Act. Repealing the finding would end the agency’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks.

The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews agency regulations, has expressed concerns over the strength of the scientific and economic analysis of the proposed repeal, the people said.

EPA officials are resisting revisions to the policy and arguing that the regulation should be finalized and announced publicly in its current form as soon as possible, they added.

The EPA’s policies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions will not make a large enough difference to the global climate to justify the enormous costs that regulations impose, said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“These rules impose vast costs on the American economy and the American people,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “They need to be abolished.”

Furchtgott-Roth said that repealing the endangerment finding would also bolster the EPA’s proposal to end Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which it issued in June and has yet to finalize.

The agency’s scientific argument for repealing the endangerment finding, released in July, primarily relied on an Energy Department report that was written last spring by a working group of five known climate skeptics. Scientists say the report is riddled with errors, and environmental groups have sued, saying the secretive way the department produced the report violated federal law. The working group has since been disbanded.

“Their work was obliterated. The criticism leaves nothing standing,” said David Doniger, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The EPA has pursued an ambitious legal strategy of rewriting and finalizing rules as quickly as possible to force them into the court system, experts say, aiming to receive favorable rulings before the end of Trump’s term.

But the agency missed its goal of finalizing the repeal of the endangerment finding by the end of 2025, and target dates for undoing other Obama- and Biden-era regulations have also slipped. READ MORE

Excerpt from Politico Pro Climatewire: A top White House regulatory czar is shoring up a final rule gutting the bedrock of U.S. climate rules even as the administration’s assault on climate science comes under legal fire, people familiar with the process said Thursday.

The deliberative work happening behind closed doors at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs pits the administration’s desire to quickly scrap EPA’s endangerment finding, which underpins many of the agency’s climate change regulations, against the imperative to ensure those actions can survive legal scrutiny. The attempt to repeal the finding is shaping up as the Trump administration’s single-biggest — and riskiest — swing at the federal government’s ability to fight rising temperatures linked to fossil fuels.

Success would deliver a long-sought win to hard right conservatives by obliterating EPA’s authority to issue rules they have likened to command-and-control diktats over the entire economy. But failure would jeopardize President Donald Trump’s goal of eradicating U.S. climate regulations before his second term ends. READ MORE

Those are just some of the words that Department of Energy scientists used to describe a 141-page report on climate change that was commissioned by DOE Secretary Chris Wright.

The feedback appears in newly revealed emails that were made public as part of a court fight between DOE and public interest groups. And they show that criticism of the report — which calls into question the basic tenets of climate science — isn’t limited to scientists outside the Trump administration.

The department’s own internal reviewers took issue with the document, which was written by five climate contrarians from outside DOE who were handpicked by Wright.

The latest revelations could further undermine the credibility of the DOE report, which is at the center of efforts by the Trump administration to roll back federal climate regulations. A team of outside climate scientists has dismissed its findings as “misleading or fundamentally incorrect” — in part because the report touts the “supposed broad benefits of carbon dioxide,” a main driver of global warming.

One DOE reviewer echoed that opinion and said it was “misleading” for the report to talk about how climate change could boost plant growth without mentioning its other drawbacks. Another comment described the report’s criticism of climate modeling as an “unjustified (and at worst a biased) judgement.” A third noted it is “misleading to state that the aggregate sea-level rise trend in U.S. tide gauges is not accelerating.”

Yet the DOE reviewers reserved some of their most pointed criticism for Wright himself, who wrote a one-page introduction to the report. In it, he criticized the news media for distorting climate science and declared that global warming “is not the greatest threat facing humanity.”

“Since the Secretary criticizes others for blurring the line between scientific conclusions and policy recommendations … it is hypocritical to offer a value judgement without clearly labeling it as such,” the commenter wrote.

Travis Fisher, a DOE adviser who helped organize the report, wrote in an email to the group of contrarian researchers that “it’s my hunch that most comments will be rejected.” READ MORE