Robin Bravender, E&E reporter 7-21-09
A group of Republicans lawmakers is waging a political war against U.S. EPA in an effort to hamstring the Obama administration’s ambitious climate agenda.
Key GOP members have launched a scathing media campaign, flooding reporters’ inboxes with a barrage of strongly worded press releases, accusatory letters to top administration officials and calls for congressional inquiries into concerns about political meddling in scientific decisions.
The Republicans say the Obama White House has set its sights on a cap-and-trade climate bill and is willing to silence dissenting views and neglect its own vows of transparency and scientific integrity in order to get there.
Many on the left, however, see a minority party on its heels using inflated arguments and diversionary tactics to stall any action on global warming emissions.
"There are some in Congress and in industry who are adamant in opposing any kind of restrictions on global warming emissions so they’re going to go to any lengths possible to try to slow that down," said Frank O’Donnell, president of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch.
Another observer called the GOP tactics a "calculated, coordinated strategy clearly to try to derail meaningful work on the climate change issue, and it has caused a certain amount of desperate actions by some Capitol Hill Republicans." That person spoke on background due to the sensitive political nature of the issue.
Since late June, Republicans have sent at least seven letters to congressional committee and subcommittee chairmen and top administration officials criticizing the agency’s alleged "suppression" of a staff report critical of EPA’s climate policies.
Some of the letters demand congressional inquiries into the agency’s handling of the proposed finding that greenhouse gases "endanger" public health and welfare, and others request further investigation into the process leading up to the proposal, which could trigger broad regulations of carbon dioxide if finalized.
Accusatory press releases in recent months have been topped with headlines like: "’Culture of Intimidation’ Rules EPA," and "EPA Holding a Smoking Gun — Barrasso Uncovers EPA Deception," "Sensenbrenner, Issa Decry EPA Exclusion of Significant Climate Data," and "Administration’s Dismissal of Advice from Career Civil Servant Raises Questions About Politicization of Regulatory Process."
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has authored at least six letters since March criticizing EPA’s proposed endangerment finding, which some see as an attempt by the administration to force Congress’ hand on climate legislation.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) has been another prominent critic of EPA climate regulations. The Wyoming senator regularly grills EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson over the agency’s climate policies during Senate hearings and has sent out a host of media alerts and inquiries to the administration criticizing "a culture of intimidation" that he says has taken over EPA.
Other prominent Republicans including Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee; Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; and Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), ranking member of a House Science and Technology subcommittee, have also sent scathing letters to administration officials criticizing EPA’s actions.
Barton held a news conference last month along with other top House Republicans, saying the agency "suppression" of staff documents raises "very serious questions about the integrity, transparency, and completeness of the process for developing EPA’s proposed endangerment finding."
And Republican communications staff on the Hill say they have no plans to let up.
"We’ll definitely continue to keep asking questions," said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Issa. "We believe that this is a real issue of American concern."
Pepper Pennington, a spokeswoman for Broun, said that her office had acted independently when sending a July 14 letter accusing the Obama administration of a "troubling pattern" in which political motives transcend the administration’s commitment to scientific integrity and transparency (E&ENews PM, July 14). "We will likely coordinate in the future," she said.
"This is a pending decision by the EPA with enormous political, economic, regulatory consequences," said Marc Morano, a former communications director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Republicans who now runs a skeptic Web site called Climate Depot. "It’s absolutely essential to make these charges and to investigate them."
EPA spokeswoman Adora Andy said the agency has responded to congressional inquiries and will continue to do so.
Scientific suppression?
Republican’s most recent target is an e-mail string from March in which an EPA career economist asked the director of EPA’s National Center of Environmental Economics to have his comments — which criticized the science supporting the finding — forwarded to the agency office responsible for managing the development of the endangerment finding. The director of the economics office declined to forward the comments in a subsequent e-mail, saying, "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision" (Greenwire, June 26).
EPA officials have dismissed the issue as a non-starter, saying that while the report’s lead author is not a scientist and was not involved in the working group dealing with the issue, he was allowed to voice his opinions both within and outside of the agency, and ideas were included in the development of the proposed endangerment finding.
But GOP critics are not satisfied. In a letter sent to Jackson on Thursday, Barton and seven other Republicans said that EPA had failed to fully respond to the requests in a letter sent June 24. Issa has sent two letters to the House Oversight Committee chairman requesting a full committee investigation into EPA’s actions.
"Recent actions suggest EPA has created a climate where dissent is discouraged and only single-minded allegiance to prevailing mindset is acceptable," Issa wrote in a July 13 letter.
The EPA e-mails contradict Jackson’s pledge to uphold scientific integrity at the agency, said a Republican Energy and Commerce Committee spokeswoman. "Republicans on four House committees are conducting separate inquiries to determine how EPA went afoul of the administrator’s pledge," she said.
And the EPA e-mail string is just the latest controversy in a series of issues that Republicans have seized upon.
Last month, House and Senate Republicans — including Inhofe, Barrasso, Issa and Sensenbrenner — criticized Jackson over reports that Carol Browner, President Obama’s energy czar, had quietly orchestrated private negotiations before releasing new national auto standards, alleging that the process violated the administration’s commitment to transparency.
Jackson told Congress that EPA had been "intimately involved" in developing the emissions standards and disputed the notion that negotiations allowing people to speak freely to each other would somehow undermine the scientific integrity of the outcome (E&ENews PM, June 9).
And in May, GOP lawmakers widely publicized an interagency document from the White House Office of Management and Budget that laid out serious concerns about the possible damaging economic effects of EPA’s endangerment proposal. Republicans cited the memo as proof that the Obama administration had ignored scientific and economic realities when issuing the proposal, while advocates of carbon regulations said the issue was a "tempest in a teapot," and dismissed the memo as an anomalous view from one agency official (Greenwire, May 14).
Some observers who downplay the GOP’s concerns say that EPA could have done more to avoid the appearance of political interference.
Tim Donaghy, an analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ scientific integrity program, said that EPA should go further to make it clear to their employees that they have the right to speak as private citizens.
"The EPA managers could have responded better, and if some of these scientific openings policies had been in place, this probably would not have been a problem," Donaghy said. Still, he said, the issue "is not really in the same ballpark," as charges of political interference under the George W. Bush administration, where interference came from very high levels in the executive branch.
Bud Ward, editor of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, said the White House and EPA are learning valuable lessons. "Every administration has to learn that the process is important, transparency is important, the appearance becomes a reality," he said.
"It’s the old Washington story where the cover-up is worse than the crime," Donaghy said. "I think it probably could have been handled better in this one in that it created an appearance that it was being suppressed or kept under the table."
Overall, Ward said, the controversy surrounding the e-mails "seems to me to be a distraction from the real issues."
O’Donnell agreed, calling the recent flurry of condemning remarks "an attempt to obfuscate the fundamental issues involving climate change and an attempt to perhaps kneecap action in the Senate."
But the debate during the Bush administration is more reason to press the Obama White House, GOP advocates say.
"For years, all we’ve heard about is that the Bush administration censored science," Morano said. "Now you come under the Obama administration and we have a documented case where higher-ups at the EPA said that his report would not be helpful and now we’re trying to find out why this report was suppressed."