As President Trump moves to end the Obama "climate" revolution, a historic environmental regulation is coming under fresh scrutiny.
As reported by Just the News, bombshell e-mails show how Obama's Environmental Protection Agency put politics before science when it published the 2009 "endangerment finding", which kicked off nearly two decades of aggressive climate rules.
In 2012, attorney Chris Horner of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute learned that Obama EPA officials, including director Lisa Jackson, were using aliases to communicate through email.
Those communications, which are heavily redacted and obtained by Horner through the Freedom of Information Act, show Obama EPA officials moving quickly to transform the agency into a sweeping regulator of the national economy.
At the time, the EPA was eagerly responding to the Supreme Court's divided ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which directed the EPA to determine if greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. Just a week after President Obama was sworn in, EPA director Jackson - who went by the pseudonym "Richard Windsor" - began meeting with legal experts such as Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University, who wrote the briefs in Massachusetts v. EPA.
A January 30, 2009, briefing attended by Heinzerling and eco-lawyer David McIntosh was titled, “Response to the Endangerment Issue from Mass v. EPA.” On February 26, Heinzerling emailed Jackson and McIntosh to say that the endangerment finding could be finalized by August or September, and regulations on car emissions could come sooner.
"You are at the forefront of progressive national policy on one of the critical issues of our time. Do you realize that?” Georgetown law professor Lisa Heinzerling wrote Jackson on Feb. 27, 2009. “You’re a good boss. I do realize that. I pinch myself all the time.”
Until March of 2009, Jackson and Heinzerling discussed a memo to the president on the endangerment finding in emails "still being kept hidden from public view," Just the News reported.
Publicly, the EPA downplayed its plans. In a February 2009 interview with the New York Times, Jackson said the science was still under review and no final decision had been made.
"We here know how momentous that decision could be,” Jackson said. “We have to lay out a road map.”
A year after the Bush administration's "Johnson memo," which found no endangerment from carbon emissions, the Obama administration had finalized its own conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger public health.
The so-called endangerment finding has been at the heart of most progressive climate regulation since then, but President Trump has pledged to turn the page on what he calls the "Green New Scam."
Trump's EPA director, Lee Zeldin, said this week that the agency will review the endangerment finding as part of a sweeping effort to curtail climate rules that have inflated the cost of everything from cars to home heating.
"We are driving a dagger through the heart of the climate-change religion and ushering in America's Golden Age," Zeldin said in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "Today is the most consequential day of deregulation in American history."
