As Trump Tries to Blame Clean Energy for World’s Problems, Whitehouse Spotlights Climate Denial Fraud Operation Inside Trump Administration

In public comment on EPA's proposed rollback of the endangerment finding, Whitehouse blasts EPA's "fraud-by-government" and "embrace of fake science" to protect fossil fuel industry's "free-to-pollute business model"

Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, this week exposed the malign influence of the fossil fuel industry's climate denial operation and its infiltration of the Trump administration in a comment submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. Whitehouse's comment was filed during the same week that President Donald Trump attempted to spread pro-polluter falsehoods at the United Nations General Assembly. Speaking before world leaders in New York City, Trump falsely claimed that renewables "don't work" and that climate change is "the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world."

Whitehouse submitted the comment in response to the Environmental Protection Agency's legally deficient and factually inaccurate proposed rollback of the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific determination by EPA that greenhouse gases harm public health and welfare that provides a legal bedrock of U.S. climate policy. Repealing the endangerment finding would fly in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and set the stage for rolling back emissions standards for motor vehicles, power plants, airplanes, and more, making it easier to pollute.

"This sham regulatory proceeding can only properly be understood against its backdrop: a multi-year, multi-billion dollar, semi-covert campaign of climate denial fraud by fossil fuel interests; and its related multi-year, multi-billion dollar, semi-covert campaign of dark-money political influence and corruption," wrote Whitehouse.

Whitehouse's opening in the comment letter details the fossil fuel industry's orchestration of the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans' energy agenda, and the industry's corrupt mission to use the power of government to kill America's clean energy industry. Whitehouse wrote:

"With this sham proceeding, climate denial fraud has metastasized inside government, with an arm of the operation operating within the halls of government, allowing fossil fuel interests to capture and exert official government agency power. A long and sordid history of agency capture, aka regulatory capture, resounds through the literature of economics and administrative law; this sorry episode of climate denial fraud is its latest and perhaps worst chapter. Consider it fraud-by-government.

"The climate denial fraud operation has never had the goal that its statements be true; only that the falsehoods be loud and persistent enough to confound rational public debate; and that it provide a rhetorical structure for the political forces influenced and/or corrupted by its dark money operation. Those persistent falsehoods and related rhetoric litter EPA's work here.

"The tactics of the climate denial fraud operation, now deployed from within government, remain the same: an embrace of fake science, propagated by a small stable of reliable climate deniers; deployment of fake proceedings that resemble legitimate proceedings but aren't; and behind it all the power of fossil fuel industry's pressure to ram the falsehoods home and protect its free-to-pollute business model. This is a simulacrum of a regulatory proceeding, not a real one."

The rollback of the endangerment finding, if finalized, would constitute a formal denial by EPA that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare-a position that defies years of scientific evidence, agency precedent, and Supreme Court rulings. To justify the repeal, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin relied on a pseudoscientific Department of Energy report written by known climate deniers with close ties to fossil fuel and polluting industries. Rife with clear errors, cherry-picked data, and misrepresented facts, the report peddles the lie that human-caused climate change is not a threat.

"In a world where climate change is causing homeowners to face gut-wrenching financial decisions as insurance premiums and nonrenewal rates soar; farmers to endure massive crop losses from flood and drought; and families to suffer grocery 'climate-flation,' food insecurity, displacement, and even illness and death, EPA's Proposal, with its legal and factual deficiencies, deserves zero credence. As a product of the fraud-by-government stage of the fossil fuel industry's linked climate denial fraud and dark money corruption operations, it merits condemnation,"Whitehouse's letter concluded.

Whitehouse and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led the entire Democratic Caucus in a separate comment letter demanding the Trump Administration withdraw its legally deficient and factually inaccurate proposed rollback of the endangerment finding. The 47 senators comprising the Senate Democratic caucus called the repeal of the climate and public health protection a "dereliction of duty" and a "blatant failure to protect the American people." Whitehouse has also launched an investigation into the extent of fossil fuel and related entities' improper influence on the Trump Administration's proposed roll back of the endangerment finding.

Whitehouse has long been the Senate's leading voice exposing the corruption of the fossil-fuel-funded climate denial operation and the fossil fuel industry's long-running covert operation to profit off the American people while damaging the economy and wrecking the planet. Whitehouse has delivered 301 speeches on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to wake up to the threat of climate change and the coming systemic shock to the economy that will be triggered by the climate crisis.

A PDF of the comment letter is available here.