Guest essay by Eric Worrall

E&E News claims that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and White House aides have devised a new plan to review the Obama Era Climate Endangerment finding.

Pruitt’s climate clash was declared dead. There’s a Plan B

Robin Bravender, E&E News reporter

Climatewire: Wednesday, March 14, 2018

In December, top aides to the president huddled in the White House with some of Scott Pruitt’s closest staffers.

The message conveyed by the White House: The EPA administrator’s idea to hold a public debate on mainstream climate science wasn’t going to happen, according to a person who attended the meeting.

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So did the White House kill Pruitt’s red team idea for good? Not exactly, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

While White House aides put the brakes on Pruitt’s plan, they also suggested an alternative, according to the person in the meeting.

Option B: Take public comments on petitions asking EPA to revisit the Obama administration’s endangerment finding, the agency’s underlying authority to regulate greenhouse gases in cars, power plants and other sources. That would allow EPA to determine “where the arguments are supporting and rejecting the science,” said the person at the meeting.

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“We would be happy if the EPA took our petition and the other petitions for reopening or reconsidering the endangerment finding and if they decided to consider those petitions in a public way,” said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ebell led Trump’s EPA transition team.

“Essentially, a red team could be a part of that process, a red team analysis of current climate science could be part of that process, and that would then allow them to make a better-informed decision about whether reopening the endangerment finding is a good idea or not,” Ebell added.

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