NYT:
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.
This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.
In early December, the E.P.A.’s draft finding that greenhouse gases endanger the environment used Energy Department data from 2007 to conclude that it would be cost effective to require the nation’s motor vehicle fleet to average 37.7 miles per gallon in 2018, according to government officials familiar with the document.
About 10 days after the finding was left unopened by officials at the Office of Management and Budget, Congress passed and President Bush signed a new energy bill mandating an increase in average fuel-economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. The day the law was signed, the E.P.A. administrator rejected the unanimous recommendation of his staff and denied California a waiver needed to regulate vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases in the state, saying the new law’s approach was preferable and climate change required global, not regional, solutions.
California’s regulations would have imposed tougher standards.
The EPA scientists said California's regulations should have been approved. But the political officials at the EPA were instructed to reject it anyway, and did so.
The Supreme Court said the EPA's process was B.S., and ordered the government to do a serious scientific evaluation of the effect of greenhouse gasses.
The EPA half-assed it, sent their report to the White House as ordered by the Supreme Court, but the White House told the EPA, and by fairly direct extension, the Supreme Court of the United States, to go pound sand.
So Waxman subpoenas the records, and they tell him the same thing. Astounded, Waxman declares, "I Don't Think We've Had a Situation Like This Since Richard Nixon.", even as we're seeing exactly this situation right now with Miers and Bolten, and Waxman had been in Congress nearly ten years already when Reagan's EPA Administrator also did this exact same thing -- advised, by the way, by the exact same White House counsel, Fred Fielding.
These are the guys who are supposed to be penned in by the brand new Double Secret Exclusivity provisions of the new FISA bill?
And they'll be watched by a Government Oversight chairman who doesn't remember the most spectacular contempt of Congress case in modern history?
Somebody wake me up from this nightmare.