Did the Obama White House Meddle with EPA’s GHG Finding?

On April 17, the Environmental Protection Agency declared [1]that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health and welfare. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson made the so-called endangerment finding under section 202 of the Clean Air Act. The finding now obliges EPA to regulate emissions under the Act.

EPA had been ready to make a similar finding during the Bush administration, but was thwarted by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. OIRA, housed within the Office of Management and Budget, is the Executive Branch clearinghouse for all things regulatory. Under Bush, OIRA refused to open EPA’s email with the finding attached, sending the document into a bureaucratic limbo.

This time around, OIRA accepted EPA’s submission of an endangerment finding and approved the document in less than one month. But I did find a strange document in the rulemaking docket that appears to have OIRA’s fingerprints on it.

The document, titled, "First (1st) Round of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Comments to USEPA on the Proposed Findings [2]," is marked deliberative under attorney-client privilege. It is not dated, and it is unclear exactly who wrote it. What is clear is that the author or authors think that the costs of greenhouse gas regulation will prove too high:

[A]n endangerment finding under section 202 may not be not the most appropriate approach for regulating GHGs. Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the CAA for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities. Should EPA later extend this finding to stationary sources, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulatory programs such as New Source Review. 

The comments also take exception to the precautionary principle, a school of thought that says decision makers should regulate (or otherwise intervene) proactively and with a better-safe-than-sorry mindset: "[T]here is a concern that EPA is making a finding based on … applying a dramatically expanded precautionary principle…Subsequently, EPA would be petitioned to find endangerment and regulate many other ‘pollutants’ for the sake of the precautionary principle."

An early draft of the endangerment finding with track changes, also in the docket, shows that someone deleted the word "precautionary" in a number of places, even though EPA never tacked on the word "principle" – that is, the agency appeared to be using the term by its standard definition.

From what I can cobble together from other documents in the docket, I suspect OIRA sent these comments to EPA on April 7, about one week before it approved the finding for publication. For now – without sure dates, names, or context – this document should be taken with a grain of salt, but if you have other thoughts or musings, please leave them in the comment section below.