From CLIMATE DEPOT

By Admin

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/biden-admin-epa-may-have-buried-comments-undermining-key-part-its-power

By Kevin Killough

The Clean Power Plan 2.0 was supported by a finding that carbon capture technology had been “adequately demonstrated.” The EPA sought and got comments from the DOE, which disputed that “demonstration.” Somehow those comments never made it into the administrative record.

Former President Joe Biden, as well as his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, pledged to “follow the science” when it came to climate policies. Since President Donald Trump assumed office — a man accused of waging a “war on science” — revelations have shown that, when it came to previous administrations, sometimes science was either shaped to serve preferred policies or dismissed when it didn’t support them.

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.

Casting significant doubt

The CPP2 requires all coal plants to install carbon capture technology by 2039, which captures and stores emissions in underground geological formations. It also requires new natural gas-fired power plants to install the technology, with requirements starting in 2032. Experts warned the rules would drive up electricity costs and destabilize the grid by disincentivizing reliable power from coal and natural gas in favor of intermittent wind and solar power.

The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to develop new emissions standards, but those standards must be achievable at a reasonable cost. The technology required for compliance must also be adequately demonstrated. Documents obtained by Just the News show that the EPA formally sought comments from NETL in March 2023 on its soon-to-be proposed rule, which was put out for public comment the following May.

In December, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, wrote to then-EPA Administrator Micheal Regan to ask for the names of people in the Biden administration who had provided comments to the EPA on an internal draft of the CPP2. These comments, Comer’s letter explains, “cast significant doubt” over whether the proposed CPP2 is viable.

Letter-to-EPA-Unmasking-Comments.pdf

The proposed rule allowed for two technologies — hydrogen and carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) — to meet the emissions standards on fossil fuel-burning power plants. Comer’s letter quotes two unnamed authors expressing that neither technology was viable.

Hydrogen was removed from the rule when it was finalized in April 2024. Carbon capture technology, however, was part of the final rule, even though the comments from one unnamed NETL author stated that “CCUS remains prohibitively expensive even after use of funds or tax credits made available through the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Underperforming failure

The comments disputing the adequacy of CCUS went further than those in Comer’s letter. Government Oversight and Accountability (GAO), a watchdog group, filed a FOIA request in April seeking comments that NETL engineers had submitted via the NETL network in response to the March 2023 request by the EPA for the administrative record of what would later become the CPP2 proposed rule.

The EPA based its determination that CCUS was “adequately demonstrated” on the performance of the Boundary Dam Unit #3 (BD3), which is a Canadian coal-fired power plant fitted with carbon capture technology. An April 2024 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis called the project an “under-performing failure.” Despite $1 billion CAD spent on the project, it was, as of April 2024, capturing far less than the 90% originally promised. Its capture rate through the end of 2023 was just 57%, which was 63% of the 90% promised, the report found.

Comments from NETL engineers, according to the GAO’s records request, state that “the ongoing operating performance of the same BD3 demonstration project is being, once again, misconstrued as having provided sufficient justification for claiming satisfactory performance to allow the technology to be considered ‘adequately demonstrated.’”

Another comment states that BD3 only approached the 90% promised target for two months over a period of 8 years and three months. Another comment states that after 8 years and three months “of demonstration, such failure to meet negligible standards for emissions limitations, over a full-year period ending less than one year ago, argues strongly for not considering BD3 as a credible basis for Best System of Emissions Reduction and ‘adequate demonstration’ of the related technology.”

“These comments were sanitized at some point in this process and were not included in NETL’s and/or DoE’s comments to EPA, which made their way into the administrative record,” according to the GAO’s record request.

4.10.25 GAO NETL request for March 2023 CPP comments.pdf

Other indications of doubt

Chris Horner, an environment and energy policy attorney, told Just the News that Comer’s letter, which was directed at the EPA, suggests where the comments might have been scrubbed.

“From information revealed by the House Oversight Committee, there’s pretty good reason to conclude that the comments did make it to and were buried by EPA, versus by DOE,” Horner said.

Whatever happened to the comments, other evidence also suggests the EPA never put much stock in the capabilities of CCUS technology. In May 2024, two dozen states filed a lawsuit over related EPA rules with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The following October, the Louisiana Public Service Commission (LPSC) asked the court to allow them to file a brief in support of the lawsuit. The LPSC said in their petition that the EPA’s own modeling showed far less confidence in carbon capture than it had publicly stated.

The agency’s Integrated Planning Model projects no combined-cycle natural gas units will have carbon capture technologies added through 2055, which is the end of the project period. The EPA also projects that no coal units will be constructed with carbon capture through 2055. The modeling document shows that only one gigawatt of existing coal capacity will be operating through 2055.

An EPA spokesperson told Just the News that the EPA, as part of its reconsideration of the CPP2, is developing a proposed rule, which will be published once it has completed an inter-agency review and been signed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

“Many have voiced concerns that the last administration’s replacement for that rule is similarly overreaching and an attempt to shut down affordable and reliable electricity generation in the United States, raising prices for American families, and increasing the country’s reliance on foreign forms of energy,” the spokesperson said.

Kill shot

Horner said these comments missing from the administrative record provide a means by which the EPA could effectively nullify the rule. In 2021, the Supreme Court killed Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” with its ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. The challenged rule set emission reduction targets that could be met by either eliminating coal-fired power plants and replacing them with natural gas turbines, improving energy efficiency, or increasing the use of wind and solar power.

The court ruled that the EPA had exceeded its authority by trying to control the nation’s power system generation, because Congress did not grant an administrative agency such control without a clear statute granting that broad authority. The court, however, affirmed the agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions at new and existing power plants. By using carbon capture without any required generation shifting, the Biden administration likely expected to avoid any conflicts with the ruling.

Horner 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.

From THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

Here’s an article you might find interesting from Science magazine on June 2. The headline is “National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing.”

Science magazine is one of those formerly-prestigious “peer-reviewed” journals where for many decades you just had to get your research published in order to become someone in a scientific field. Somewhere along the way, Science turned from scientific inquiry to orthodoxy enforcement. The National Academy of Sciences (“NAS,” and along with two fellow Academies of Engineering and Medicine sometimes called “NASEM”), meanwhile, is a federally-chartered but supposedly private entity set up to give “independent” scientific advice to the government. The Academies raise meaningful amounts of private funds, but in the most recent reported year (2023) got the substantial majority of their funding (over $200 million) via contracts from the feds. (See Treasurer’s Statement here.). As far as I can determine, the main business of the National Academies, and particularly of the NAS, is also orthodoxy enforcement.

The latest, from the June 2 Science article, is that the National Academy of Sciences “is navigating a tense situation as the organization faces unprecedented contract losses and layoffs.” The President of the NAS is named Marcia McNutt. The Science piece describes a May 21 email sent by McNutt to colleagues outlining how the Academies (and their umbrella organization the National Research Council) plan to respond to funding cuts. Excerpt:

“While it is too early to share specific outcomes, we anticipate that the NRC will emerge as a smaller organization with fewer units,” McNutt wrote in a 21 May email.

How big are the funding cuts?

From Trump’s inauguration to 6 May, NRC lost 41 U.S. government contracts and received another eight stop-work orders. . . . The DOGE website lists 36 of the canceled NASEM contracts, and Science calculated the total cost of these losses to be more than $25 million.

Well, so far by my calculation that’s $25 million down and $175 million to go.

Is there anything about the NAS that’s worth preserving at all? To answer that question, you need to consider its long-time President, Marcia McNutt. Ms. McNutt transitioned from editor-in-chief of Science magazine over to President of the NAS way back in late 2015/early 2016. At that time I wrote two posts on that subject, here on December 18, 2015, and here on February 8, 2016. The focus of those two posts was what I called the “epidemic” of orthodoxy enforcement in the U.S. scientific establishment. And I identified the leader of that epidemic as Ms. McNutt.

In the December 2015 post I featured an extraordinary email submitted by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars opposing Ms. McNutt’s candidacy for President of NAS (although there was no other serious contender for the position at the time). Mr. Wood identified three major areas of scientific inquiry, all with huge money at stake, where Ms. McNutt as editor of Science had led the forces seeking to suppress all dissenting evidence and data. The three areas were (1) the so-called “linear no threshold” hypothesis as to the effects of pollutants and carcinogens (including radiation); (2) the health effects of very small particulate matter (2.5 microns or smaller) in the air (known as “PM 2.5”); and (3) the so-called “consensus model” of climate change driven by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I will repeat here a long excerpt from Mr. Wood’s email that I included in that 2015 post:

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge.  The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.  Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . .  Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing. . . .

1.  The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation.  The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.  This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers.  These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary.  In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it.  However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence.  Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed.  This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies.  The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2.  Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution(PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality.  Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established a national regulation based on this claim.  Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA.  The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence.  This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans.  The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Further to the subject of climate orthodoxy enforcement, my February 2016 post quoted from a July 2015 editorial in Science authored by Ms. McNutt. Excerpt:

The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently announced that current commitments to cut CO2 emissions [known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] from the world’s nations are insufficient to avoid warming the entire planet by an average of more than 2°C above the preindustrial level. To set more aggressive targets, developed nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further, and by doing so, create roadmaps for developing nations to leapfrog technologies by installing low-CO2–emitting energy infrastructure rather than coal-fired power plants as they expand their energy capacity.

In the time since 2016, Ms. McNutt and the NAS have been central actors in suppressing dissenting voices in the climate debate.

And here’s something else from the June 2 Science piece:

The presidents of those three honorific societies that together with NRC comprise NASEM—McNutt, John Anderson, and Victor Dzau—each earned more than $1 million in 2023. . . . At a time when hundreds of jobs are at risk, “It is galling that the leadership of the institution makes that kind of money,” says one senior program officer with a decade of experience at the institution.

I can’t think of any reason why any organization headed by Ms. McNutt should get a dime of taxpayer money. Can you?