On June 6th (updated June 8th) Just the News posted an article about some of the dishonesty in the Biden administration dealing with the actual facts on the impact of natural gas on the environment.
The article reports:
Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed in March that the Biden-Harris administration had completed a study on liquefied natural gas exports prior to enacting a pause on export permits, the stated intention of which was to complete such a study. Wright stated that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t like what the study said, so they set out to produce one that would support the climate policies they wanted.
Emails exchanged at the Obama-era EPA in 2009 showed that the so-called endangerment finding, which has been the basis for much of the EPA’s regulation of carbon dioxide emissions ever since, was a foregone conclusion even before the agency announced the finding.
It appears that the Biden-Harris administration hid comments that would have undermined its Clean Power Plan 2.0 rule (CPP2), which the Trump administration is currently reviewing. The EPA had sought comments from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) on the efficacy of carbon capture technology prior to proposing the rule. These comments, which were somehow scrubbed from the administrative record, disputed a key claim the rule is based on. Those missing comments, a legal expert says, could provide a basis for the rule’s repeal.
The article concludes:
Horner (Chris Horner, an environment and energy policy attorney) said that, if the parties agree the record is incomplete, the Trump administration’s EPA can avoid arguing for months whether CCS has been adequately demonstrated. By simply documenting that the record shows the agency knowingly and falsely claimed CCS was adequately demonstrated, that’s the end of it. Horner said he doesn’t think the D.C. Circuit court would ignore that fact and deny the agency the opportunity to clean its own house.
“There seems to me no chance the parties would be denied an agency confession of error. That’s what’s really grabbing me about this. These guys have a kill shot, and I don’t know if they know it,” Horner said.
I suspect this is not the only incidence of skewed science to advance the ‘green agenda.’