President Barack Obama has quietly presented a proposal that would allow him to bypass Congress in his efforts to reduce global warming. It is the “Endangerment Finding,” which is a scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declaring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be public health dangers. This would give a mandate to the administration, rather than to Congress, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. According to Philip Radford, Greenpeace USA’s executive director, “the administration can do what has been widely dismissed as politically infeasible, but what scientists and others warn is environmentally and economically essential: reducing US global warming pollution from 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”
However, on Tuesday, May 12,
Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said, “The endangerment finding is a scientific finding mandated by law... It does not mean regulation.” The EPA’s proposed finding has been criticized in an inter-agency document by the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which warns that "making the decision to regulate CO2 under the [Clean Air Act] for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities." The OMB has defended itself, claiming the document was composed of “disparate comments from various agencies during the inter-agency review process of the proposed finding… and do not necessarily represent the views of [the] OMB.”
Clean Air Watch president Frank O'Donnell called the OMB memo "nothing short of a direct attack on the EPA's proposed finding” and “an appalling document which reads like something that could have been written by (Oklahoma Sen.) Jim Inhofe or (Texas Rep. Joe Barton).”
-Jenny Kim
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