EPA: Greenhouse gases endanger human health

WASHINGTON – Officials tell The Associated Press that the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded greenhouse gases are endangering people's health and must be regulated. The EPA will announced its findings at a news conference Monday. The announcement is timed to boost the Obama administration's arguments at an international climate conference — beginning this week — that the United States is taking actions to combat global warming, even though Congress has yet to act on climate legislation. Under a Supreme Court ruling, the so-called endangerment finding is needed before the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases released from power plants, factories and automobiles under the federal Clean Air Act.

Let ‘em try it. “Regulations” can be litigated, and will be. As with any so called, “climate treaty”, we will never allow them to go into effect. bttt

July 2, 2009
Senate May Pass U.S. Climate Bill, Reject Treaty, Kerry Says
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601130&sid=aMs9V_EUxE0Y
By Jim Efstathiou Jr. and Daniel Whitten

....”Passing domestic climate-change legislation remains the most crucial step, Purvis said.

Ironically, The “EPA” came out and said “There are no findings that Co2 is dangerous to the environment...” Funny.... 6

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/05/12/guest-blog-senator-john-barrasso-r-wy-uncovers-epa-deception/#more-6615

Internal Memo Confirms EPA Regulation of CO2 Will Hurt Economy!
http://patrioticmind.com/2009/05/internal-memo-confirms-epa-regulation-of-co2-will-hurt-economy/
by Patriot-in-Chief on May 12, 2009 ·

ABC News Correspondent Jake Tapper is reporting on an internal Obama administration memo to the EPA. The memo is warning that regulation under the clean air act will damage the economy, especially small business and communities.

“That nine-page memo voices “a concern that EPA is making a finding based on (1) ‘harm’ from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects, such as respiratory or toxic effects, (2) available scientific data that purports to conclusively establish the nature and extent of the adverse public health and welfare impacts are almost exclusively from non-EPA sources, and (3) applying a dramatically expanded precautionary principle.”
If the EPA goes forward with a finding of endangerment for all six greenhouse gases, the document warns, “it could be establishing a relaxed and expansive new standard for endangerment. Subsequently, EPA would be petitioned to find endangerment and regulate many other ‘pollutants’ for the sake of the precautionary principle (e.g., electromagnetic fields, perchlorates, endocrine disruptors, and noise).”

This is of course directly the opposite of the Obama administrations message to the public that Cap-and-Trade would be an economic boon to our country. Read the orignial memo here: EPA memo http://patrioticmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/epa.pdf

More information on this whole ongoing scam can be found here. http://patrioticmind.com/2009/04/taxing-the-very-air-we-breathe/

Update: Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) blogs on the “Smoking Gun” memo at Heritage.org.

Read it here. http://blog.heritage.org/2009/05/12/guest-blog-senator-john-barrasso-r-wy-uncovers-epa-deception/

Guest Blog: Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) Uncovers EPA Deception

Posted May 12th, 2009 at 3.39pm in Energy and Environment, Ongoing Priorities.
EPA Holds ‘Smoking Gun’ Memo from the White House
VIDEO at link
Today I exposed a “smoking gun” White House memo to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The memo warns that regulation of small CO2 emitters will have “serious economic consequences” for businesses and the overall economy. I was questioning EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson during the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee budget hearing.

I received the memo this morning, that’s marked ‘Deliberative: Attorney-Client Privilege’. In this memo Counsel for the White House repeatedly, repeatedly suggests a lack of scientific support for this proposed finding. This is a smoking gun, saying that the EPA findings were political and not scientific.

The EPA has failed to release the memo and has ignored the advice.

The nine-page White House memo undermines the EPA’s reasoning for a proposed finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health.

This misuse of the Clean Air Act will be a trigger for overwhelming regulation and lawsuits based on gases emitted from cars, schools, hospitals and small business. This will affect any number of other sources, including lawn mowers, snowmobiles and farms. This will be a disaster for the small businesses that drive America.

To quote from the memo to the EPA, “making the decision to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the US economy, including small businesses and small communities.”

The memo is an amalgamation of findings from government agencies’ sent from the Office of Management and Budget to the EPA.

This smoking gun memo is in stark contrast to the official position presented by the Administration and the EPA Administrator.

Despite the findings in the memo, the White House has given the EPA the green light to move ahead with regulation under the Clean Air Act.

According to government records, the document was submitted by the OMB as comment on the EPA’s April proposed finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare.

The memo - marked as “Deliberative-Attorney Client Privilege” - doesn’t have a date or a named author. But an OMB spokesman confirmed to news agencies that it was prepared by Obama administration staff.

BACKGROUND: The White House brief questions the link between the EPA’s scientific technical endangerment proposal and the EPA’s political summary. Administrator Jackson said in the endangerment summary that “scientific findings in totality point to compelling evidence of human-induced climate change, and that serious risks and potential impacts to public health and welfare have been clearly identified…”

The White House memo notes, the EPA endangerment technical document points out there are several areas where essential behaviors of greenhouse gases are “not well determined” and “not well understood.”

It warns about the adequacy of the EPA finding that the gases are a harm to the public when there is “no demonstrated direct health effects,” and the scientific data on which the agency relies are “almost exclusively from non-EPA sources.”

The memo contends that the endangerment finding, if finalized by the administration, could make agencies vulnerable to litigation alleging inadequate environmental permitting reviews, adding that the proposal could unintentionally trigger a cascade of regulations.

The views expressed by guest bloggers on the Foundry do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heritage Foundation.

State of Knowledge
Related Links

U.S. Global Research Program

* Product 5.2 - Best practice approaches for characterizing, communicating, and incorporating scientific uncertainty in decisionmaking
* Vision for the Program and Highlights of the Scientific Strategic Plan

What’s Known | What’s Very Likely | What’s Not Certain

As with any field of scientific study, there are uncertainties associated with the science of climate change. This does not imply that scientists do not have confidence in many aspects of climate science. Some aspects of the science are known with virtual certainty1, because they are based on well-known physical laws and documented trends. Current understanding of many other aspects of climate change ranges from “very likely” to “uncertain.”
What’s Known

Scientists know with virtual certainty that:

* Human activities are changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times are well-documented and understood.
* The atmospheric buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is largely the result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
* An “unequivocal” warming trend of about 1.0 to 1.7°F occurred from 1906-2005. Warming occurred in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and over the oceans (IPCC, 2007).
* The major greenhouse gases emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere for periods ranging from decades to centuries. It is therefore virtually certain that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to rise over the next few decades.
* Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations tend to warm the planet.

Top of page
What’s Very Likely?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (IPCC, 2007). In short, a growing number of scientific analyses indicate, but cannot prove, that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are contributing to climate change (as theory predicts). In the coming decades, scientists anticipate that as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise, average global temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise as a result and precipitation patterns will change.

Top of page
What’s Not Certain?

Important scientific questions remain about how much warming will occur, how fast it will occur, and how the warming will affect the rest of the climate system including precipitation patterns and storms. Answering these questions will require advances in scientific knowledge in a number of areas:

* Improving understanding of natural climatic variations, changes in the sun’s energy, land-use changes, the warming or cooling effects of pollutant aerosols, and the impacts of changing humidity and cloud cover.
* Determining the relative contribution to climate change of human activities and natural causes.
* Projecting future greenhouse emissions and how the climate system will respond within a narrow range.
* Improving understanding of the potential for rapid or abrupt climate change.

Addressing these and other areas of scientific uncertainty is a major priority of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). The CCSP is developing twenty-one Synthesis and Assessment products to advance scientific understanding of these uncertainty areas by the end of 2008. More information.

Top of page
References

* IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Exit EPA DisclaimerContribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning (eds.)].

1 Throughout the science section of this Web site, use of “virtual certainty” (or virtually certain) conveys a greater than 99% chance that a result is true. Other terms used to communicate confidence include “extremely likely” (greater than 95% chance the result is true), “very likely” (greater than 90% chance the result is true), “likely” (greater than 66% chance the result is true), “more likely than not” (greater than 50% chance the result is true), “unlikely” (less than 33% chance the result is true), “very unlikely” (less than 10% chance the result is true), and “extremely unlikely” (less than 5% chance the result is true). These judgmental estimates originate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007).

This was always the threat and one house rep voted because he said Obama and browner promised severe regulation by EPA if climate bill did not pass. He said he would rather pass a bill with firm regulations than what EPA with full reign would do.

So going in Obama had a back up. Do it my way or it will be worse. There is still some thought whether EPA has Constitutional right. Anything they do will end up in court.

With Socialist party member Carol Browner former EPA admin, this is only a beginning of what she will pull for Obama's totalitarian regime. Right on target so the threat is there at the opening of Copenhagen.

What will the people do when businesses shut down because of Obama and Browners need to control the people?! Obama has done everything he can to kill business and jobs. Now he will have control over them like he mentioned about coal companies, he will tax them into bankruptcy.

DRUNK with power!

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/07/guest-blogger-rep-sensenbrenner-r-wi-on-climategate-should-be-in-copenhagen-agenda/#more-21252

Imagine an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where all the members showed up drunk and with extra cases of wine, beer, and booze to keep them happy. Now imagine that that same group of drunks was empowered to make trillions of dollars worth of economic decisions for everybody in the world. This absurd scenario swiftly summarizes the United Nations Climate Change Conference beginning today, and lasting through December 18, in Copenhagen.

Despite the fact that the entire conference is founded on the belief that human economic activity, especially flying and driving, is emitting levels of greenhouse gasses that will soon kill us all, plutocrats from around the world have marshaled over 1,200 limos and 140 private planes to travel to and around Copenhagen over the next two weeks.

1) Wealth transfers: China emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation. Other developing countries, like India and Brazil, are also heavy emitters. But before these nations agree to even monitor their greenhouse gas emissions, they demand to be paid. Some are asking for as much one percent of the developed world’s GDP. For the U.S., that’s a price tag of $140 billion a year—more than 5 times our entire foreign aid budget of $28 billion per year.

Bill Anderson, keeping the memory 'green':

Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged “acid rain” problems and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA) had wanted to see.

Acid rain, apparently, was not going to destroy U.S. forests, lakes, and rivers, and the government was ticked, really ticked. The EPA attempted to destroy the career of one scientist, Edward Krug, who had a paper in the prestigious Science in 1983 that demonstrated that lakes with high acidity were located in watersheds where the soil happened to be acidic. Furthermore, as Krug and other researchers noted, acid lakes existed in many places around the globe hundreds of years before “industrial society” became the norm.

This researched “watershed-based” conclusion (which now is the accepted theory of lake and stream acidification, not “acid rain”) was unacceptable to the EPA, and the agency engaged in a shameful campaign against Krug, something I documented in a January, 1992, cover story article in Reason. During my research for the article, one person told me that there would be no such government study for “global warming,” indicating that the government would ramrod through the policies it wanted whether or not they actually were necessary.

That tactic described was a test run; it's becoming SOP.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.