"Republican allies of the oil and gas industry question the objectivity of an independent report from the nation’s top science advisers on the harms of human-caused climate change."
"Soon after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a plan to revoke its legal authority to regulate climate pollutants last summer, the nation’s most respected scientific organization fast-tracked a review of the latest evidence on whether greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.
Now Republican leaders of the House science committee — who have received generous campaign donations from the fossil-fuel industry — are questioning the “formation, funding and expedited timeline” of the expert committee that reviewed the evidence of climate pollution’s harms for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The Trump administration said its proposed repeal was justified because the EPA had “unreasonably” analyzed the scientific record in making its 2009 endangerment finding, the legal basis for regulating emissions from vehicles and other climate-pollution sources under the Clean Air Act. Developments since then, the administration claimed, “cast significant doubt on the reliability of the findings.”
For the National Academies—private, nongovernmental institutions obligated by an 1863 congressional charter to provide the nation with objective scientific advice—such significant claims about the scientific record demanded careful review. Climate science has advanced considerably since the Obama administration made its endangerment finding."
