Horses hang close to the hay feeder on a south Panhandle ranch last Thursday as snow falls from a slow moving winter storm system. About a half-inch of moisture was measured in the 11 inches of new snow.

Last Tuesday, Feb. 16, the state of Texas filed suit in federal court, asking that the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding emissions of so-called greenhouse gasses be overturned. The states of Virginia and Utah chimed in later in the week, with the Old Dominion filing petitions with both the EPA and the Federal Appeals Court in Washington and the Utah State House passing a resolution asking the government to halt plans to regulate carbon dioxide.



In its formal endangerment finding late last year, the EPA found that man made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and four other gasses posed a real and present danger to human life due to their impact on climate, and announced plans to regulate such emissions by setting output caps and taxing released gasses.



Though the agency claims authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, the move to tax such emissions is unprecedented, given the fact that congress alone has the authority to levy federal taxes.



Opponents of the finding and proposed regulations note that rather than independently studying the climate situation with in-house resources, EPA chose to base their actions on the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN-IPCC).



In failing to conduct basic research or to verify the correctness of IPCC finding, the EPA has fallen far short of exercising the responsibility entrusted them by the American people, say opponents of the action.



This is especially problematic, argue legislators in Texas, Virginia and Utah, in light of the serious problems found in recent months with IPCC research methods and findings. Revelations of research fraud surfaced late last year when e-mail correspondence at the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, contributors to the IPCC reports, exposed that some warming climate data were being invented, while cooling data were being ignored, overlooked, and hidden.



In the Texas suit, state Attorney General Greg Abbott said serious problems with IPCC and CRU data and conclusions make any policy decisions based on that work flawed and unjustified. Abbot said it is clear that at least some IPCC and CRU climate scientists engaged in “...an ongoing, orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research and manipulate temperature data.”



“With billions of dollars at stake, EPA outsourced the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy,” he argued.





For the complete article see the 02-26-2010 issue.

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