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Ohio Coal Association Challenges EPA Climate Decision

By The Pullins Group LLC

Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association, announced today that the association is challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) ?Endangerment Finding? for greenhouse gases. On Friday, February 12, 2010, the association filed a petition for reconsideration with the EPA, asking EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to review her agency?s decision in light of damaging disclosures calling into question the validity of its underlying climate data. Additionally, on Tuesday, February 16, 2010, the coal association filed a separate petition for review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The association urged the EPA to reconsider its actions, and for the federal appeals court to review EPA's actions because of the inevitable and severe harm it will inflict upon Ohio's coal mining industry. Carey said, ?The EPA relied on the United Nation?s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which we now know was simply not credible. These were not scientists seeking the truth. This was an organization with a political agenda, intent on showing a pattern of global warming. The EPA has no choice but to go back to the drawing board, and find a legitimate, independent scientific research organization capable of collecting data and objectively analyzing it.?

According to Carey, the EPA?s current path regarding greenhouse gases would make the coal industry extinct. ?That would kill mining jobs and jobs across the American economy. Furthermore, the regulatory burden would also jeopardize the nation?s goal of energy independence, threaten our national security and raise rates for the great majority of consumers who are dependent on low cost electricity supplied by coal-fired power plants.?

Last year, the association warned the EPA that its decision to charge forward with regulations that will cripple the U.S. economy and devastate the mining industry in Ohio and beyond is irrational and should be reversed. It has now come to light that the EPA?s decision to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act was based, in large part, upon flawed research provided by the IPCC.

The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following the anonymous leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, which generated the data used by IPCC in reaching its conclusions. Those emails revealed that IPCC member scientists were destroying data, deleting emails, falsifying information, exaggerating information and using flawed methodology in analyzing historical climate data. The CRU emails further disclosed a pattern of bias against, and hostility towards, scientists who questioned the research methods or conclusions of those who believed that significant global warming, caused by humans, has been occurring.

Rather than acting as objective, truth-seeking scientists, CRU undertook its work with a strong bias towards showing a historical warming pattern. Now the subject of multiple investigations, these revelations of misconduct by CRU has called into question the IPCC report, upon which EPA based its conclusions.

?We can not sit back and allow the EPA to take such drastic action, imposing new regulations that are certain to crush the coal industry in Ohio and throughout the United States, based upon biased and invalid science,? said Carey.

The Ohio Coal Association is a trade association dedicated to representing Ohio's coal industry. The association is committed to advancing the development and utilization of Ohio coal as an abundant, economic and environmentally sound energy source. Ohio has one of the lowest electric rates in the world because its coal-fired plants provide citizens with low-cost, reliable electricity. Nearly 90 percent of Ohio's electricity comes from coal, and coal provides over half of the nation's electricity needs. The Ohio coal industry directly employs over 3,000 individuals, with studies showing over 30,000 additional spin-off jobs in local communities throughout Ohio. Additional information is available at www.ohiocoal.com.

Full post as published by The Pullins Report on February 18, 2010 (boomark / email).