DOE Climate ‘Endangerment’ Report Sparks Stormy Retort

The Department of Energy, headquartered in the Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C., this summer issued a controversial report on a key climate policy. Photo: U.S. Geological Survey (United States government work).

Backgrounder: DOE Climate ‘Endangerment’ Report Sparks Stormy Retort

By Joseph A. Davis

The Trump administration’s effort to justify repealing the scientific and legal basis for climate action is headed for a showdown.

Legitimate scientists in large numbers have excoriated a report issued this summer by the Department of Energy that attempts to undermine the legal foundation for regulating emissions of greenhouse gases.

That foundation is called the “endangerment finding.”

 

What is the endangerment finding?

The Clean Air Act explicitly authorizes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate pollutants that it finds endanger human health.

The initial 1970 law named a set of six health-endangering pollutants — but authorized the EPA to add more pollutants if it found they endangered human health.

This clear meaning of the Clean Air Act, mentioned at 42 USC 7408 and 42 USC 7409, and particularly at 42 USC 7521(a), authorizes new findings on pollutants that endanger health.

The law not only authorizes but actually requires the EPA to review the list every five years and to revise it as the agency sees fit.

A key turning point came in 2007, when the Supreme Court decided Massachusetts v. EPA — upholding the contention that the Clean Air Act did indeed give the EPA authority to declare new health-harming pollutants.

 

The Obama EPA declared

carbon dioxide and some

other greenhouse gases

to be health threats.

 

And the EPA, under the Obama administration in 2009, did just that. The action was called the endangerment finding. The agency declared carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases to be health threats.

Ever since, administrations, states, industries and environmental groups have been litigating over EPA efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles.

 

Trump EPA starts repeal effort

The EPA did not try to repeal the endangerment finding during Trump’s first stint in office.

But in Trump 2.0, the agency has declared its intention to repeal it — making almost all regulation of greenhouse gas emissions impossible.

Its announcement came July 29, but it did not take effect immediately. First, the agency would have to go through rulemaking procedures, and that process has started.

The docket for this rulemaking is here. It provides an illuminating window into the issue. And it’s where many of the stories have come from.

 

Enter the DOE report

The linchpin of the administration’s effort so far is a “scientific” report issued July 29 by the DOE (the same day the EPA announced its planned repeal). The DOE announcement is here and the report itself is here.

Although most scientists are convinced that human-caused emissions are already bringing about rapid climate change right now — the proportion is estimated to be over 97% — of the five listed authors of that report, at least three are “climate skeptics.” They are:

• John Christy: A climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Christy has been a regular critic of the scientific consensus, focusing on reinterpretation of satellite temperature data.
• Judith Curry: Now retired, Curry was a climatologist and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She still publishes her Climate Etc. blog, a focal point of climate denialism.
• Roy W. Spencer: A research climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Spencer focuses on satellite data interpretation. He often works with John Christy.
• Steven E. Koonin: He was once chief scientist for the petroleum company BP. An MIT Ph.D., he worked at the DOE under Obama. He now works at Stanford University’s conservative think tank, the Hoover Institution.
• Ross McKitrick: A Canadian economist at the University of Guelph, McKitrick co-authored the climate-denying book, “Taken by Storm.”

In short, the authors of the DOE report could be expected to take a skeptical view toward the consensus on climate science.

 

What the report says

We could summarize the DOE report by saying that it mostly denies consensus science on climate, as expressed by large international collaborations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Here are a few quotes from its executive summary:

“Elevated concentrations of CO2 directly enhance plant growth, globally contributing to ‘greening’ the planet and increasing agricultural productivity.”

“The world’s several dozen global climate models offer little guidance on how much the climate responds to elevated CO2.”

“Global climate models generally run ‘hot’ in their description of the climate of the past few decades.”

“Most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.”

“Both models and experience suggest that CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed.”

There’s more, but here’s the gist: “U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts.”

The EPA cited this report as partial justification for its proposed reversal of the endangerment finding.

 

Criticism of the report

It did not take long for criticism of the DOE report to erupt. Loudly.

Most of the harshest responses showed up as comments in the docket for the repeal.

Within a day of the EPA’s announcement, climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania told The Guardian the report was what you’d expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites.”

 

‘This is an agenda to promote

fossil fuels, not to protect

public health and welfare

or the environment.’

                  — Rachel Cleetus,

Union of Concerned Scientists

 

“This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,” was the response of Rachel Cleetus, of the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists.

And one group of over 85 climate scientists had this to say: “Our review reveals that the DOE report's key assertions—including claims of no trends in extreme weather and the supposed broad benefits of carbon dioxide—are either misleading or fundamentally incorrect. The authors reached these flawed conclusions through selective filtering of evidence ('cherry picking'), overemphasis of uncertainties, misquoting peer-reviewed research, and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research.”

And the preeminent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine weighed in mid-September with a new report that found “the evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute.”

 

The lawsuits commence

By mid-August, at least two groups had filed a federal lawsuit against the DOE and the EPA over the report.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund claimed in their suit that the DOE had recruited the report’s five authors secretly — and that the DOE had thus violated the Federal Advisory Committees Act, which prohibits secrecy.

We suspect that the lawsuits have only just started, considering the stakes.

[Editor’s Note: For more on covering climate change, visit our Topic on the Beat page, which includes a library of related SEJournal stories, plus climate change headlines from EJToday. Also see our Climate Change Resource Guide and special reports on Covering Climate Solutions, Covering Your Climate: The South and Covering Your Climate: The Emerald Corridor.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 36. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.