Trump’s attack on climate rules gets awkward
By ARIANNA SKIBELL
Excerpt:
The White House is trying to shore up its legal justification for repealing U.S. climate regulations after a bungled climate report turned into a liability.
Successfully obliterating the 2009 finding that climate pollution endangers public health and welfare — the justification for most climate regulations — would be a massive victory for President Donald Trump, who has worked relentlessly to undermine the government’s ability to fight rising temperatures driven by burning fossil fuels, write Alex Guillén, Zack Colman and Jean Chemnick.
The administration’s greatest obstacle, however, may be itself.
When it proposed repealing the so-called endangerment finding last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency based much of its justification on a draft report from the Energy Department that alleged big flaws in the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. That report has since become a political and legal lightning rod.
The report’s authors, handpicked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have promoted contrarian views on climate science rejected by the vast majority of researchers. Wright ultimately disbanded the task force last year as environmental groups sued for public disclosure of the panel’s records. And then a federal judge found that DOE’s Climate Working Group had violated federal transparency rules for advisory panels, and the Justice Department decided not to contest the transparency claim.
Jeffrey Clark, the White House’s regulatory chief inside the Office of Management and Budget, is now pushing the administration to strengthen its legal defense without relying on the tainted report. Clark is a former Justice Department lawyer under Trump with his own history of battling climate science.
“Trump’s got a great agenda,” said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser and longtime critic of climate science. “But there’s more to it than just saying, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do this.’ You have to get it done right, and it’s got to survive judicial review.”
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