Email messages exchanged by the Environmental Protection Agency and various nongovernmental environmental groups, during the drafting of the agency’s carbon emissions standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants, “damningly illustrate” that the EPA was a “captured body allowing green pressure groups improper influence,” according to a report issued Monday by the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute.
According to the report, which is based on emails E&E Legal obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Michael Goo, at the time EPA’s associate administrator for the Office of Policy, shared drafts of the rules using his private email account with lobbyists and high-level staffers at the Sierra Club, Clean Air Task Force, and the Natural Resource Defense Council. Goo allegedly also received “volumes of these lobbyists’ advice, consultant papers, edits, other collaboration and even hectoring for not possessing expertise on the issue,” the report says.
E&E Legal asserts that the EPA’s rules are illegal, citing a 1977 case between Home Box Office and the Federal Communications Commission, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of appeals declared that “[i]f actual positions were not revealed in public comments . . . and, further, if the Commission relied on these apparently more candid private discussions in framing the final . . . rules, then the elaborate public discussion in these dockets has been reduced to a sham.”
“These emails demonstrate that, if EPA is to regulate as it seeks to do by these rules, the Agency must start over, proceeding lawfully, affording all interested parties the same access and full ability to comment on the information presented to EPA at all relevant times, and involving only officials unburdened by the unalterably closed minds of those who produced these rules,” according to the report.
EPA declined to comment on the report.
