November was a really big month for climate lawsuits. Earlier in the month, the folks who had been petitioning the EPA to use the Toxic Substances Control Act or TOSCA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions filed a civil suit to compel them to do so. Here's longtime EPA scientist Don Viviani on why.
I could never understand when I was at the agency why they would meet a petition to regulate greenhouse guests is under TOSCO. It's maddening that with a petition they're unwilling to do their job. Tosc is a chemical safety Act supposed to keep us safe from unsafe chemicals. O two and methane are the two most unsafe chemicals that mankind has ever been presented with.
We'll hear more from Viviani as well as Dan Gelbern, the lead attorney on that case, in a minute. But first, in other major climate litigation news, the first ever climate RICO case has now been filed. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in the nineteen seventies to give the government a way to deal with organized crime the mafia. In the eighties, the Supreme Court upheld the use of the law in civil cases as well, which
can be brought against individuals, organizations, or corporations. If you listened to our season on the Chevron Ecuador case, you might remember that Chevron successfully sued US attorney Stephen Donziger under Rico. This time, the complaint flows the other way, alleging that the global oil majors, their trade associations, and a network of dark money funded think tanks and operatives where part of an organized conspiracy to mislead the public
on climate change, resulting in a multitude of damages. The plaintiffs in this case are sixteen municipalities in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico that suffered tremendous damage when Hurricane Maria hit and are steering down the barrel of more intense and more frequent hurricanes for the foreseeable future, as we saw recently with Hurricane Fiona. I started following this case three years ago and went to Puerto Rico in twenty
nineteen with Attorney Melissa Kay Sims. Simms is senior counsel for the plaintiff's law firm Millburg, which also handled several of the opioid Rico cases. In fact, Sims originally went to Puerto Rico while working on one of those cases.
The interesting part about the opioid litigation is that really it all started in Puerto Rico. Yeah, we represent most of the municipalities. We follow the class action for the municipalities in Puerto Rico early on, and we filed racketeering out one of the first cases that filed racketeering in federal court. And what we found out was, you know, Puerto Rico has been kind of the guinea pig for big Pharma.
One of her first trips there was about a year after Hurricane Maria, and she was shocked by how much devastation there still was. I was shocked by how much there was even in twenty nineteen, and there's still things that haven't been fixed, or things that were fixed and
that got broken again when Fiona hit. While she was traveling back and forth to Puerto Rico, Sim saw various articles in newspapers talking about how hurricanes were becoming more intense, storm surge was becoming more damaging thanks to climate change, and importantly, how several of these outcomes had been predicted decades earlier by climate scientists. Who were working for oil companies at the time. A light bulb went off.
If it's proven that you that you cause it, and if it's proven that you, you know, conspired with somebody else to profit off that loss to the municipality, you should have paper.
Last week, Milberg, the firm that SIMS works with, filed a reco case on behalf of sixteen Puerto Rican municipalities against seven oil companies, three coal companies, and hundreds of organizations and operatives alleging consumer fraud, racketeering, antitrust, fraudulent misrepresentation, negligent misrepresentation, negligent fraudulent concealment, conspiracy to defraud, products, liability, strict liability, failure to warn, negligent failure to warn, and
unjust enrichment as a result of the devastating storms of September twenty seventeen and the aftermath of those storms, which occurred as a result of the defendants acts and omissions. It's a whopping case. The complaint itself is thousands of pages, with lots and lots of exhibits. I'll be bringing you a whole lot more this story in the weeks and months ahead. But having spoken to a few legal analysts about it already, I can say it is a big deal.
After the break, we're going to talk about the other climate case I mentioned up top. NASA climate scientist James Hanson, Carbon Major's Report author Richard Heady, and a handful of other folks have sued the EPA to compel them to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
I'm Amie Westervelt, and this is drilled earlier this year, doctor James Hanson, Richard Heaty, Don Viviani, who you heard from up top, and climate psychologist Lee's Van Susterron filed a petition to the EPA asking them to make a determination around a pretty straightforward question, do greenhouse gases post
was an unreasonable risk to environmental and human health? If so, they would fall under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TOSCA, which explicitly gives the EPA the right to create rules that would remove that harm. In September, the EPA rejected that petition, and in early November the petitioners took their case to court. I talked to Attorney Dan Gilburn of the Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative and Viviani shortly after the case was filed.
My name is Don Viviani. I was a scientist at EPA for about thirty four to thirty five years, and at one point in the nineties I was director of
the Climate Policy Assessment Division. So a lot of what's going on now is my fault, and I apologize for that, but it was a long time ago, and I also had some other divisions that were with regulations, and I was I was chairman of the Great Lakes and Water Quality Commission Toxic Substice Commission, so I know a little bit about all of the things that are here.
My name is Dan Galpern. I am the founder, executive director and General counsel of Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative, and for about the last thirteen years and still I serve as the attorney and policy advisor to the well known climate scientist James Hansen. And I met John probably about seven years ago when we were talking of a similar petition to the Environmental Protection Agency that he actually filed.
So under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Environmental Protection Agency is to impose certain restrictions on a chemical substance or mixture where the agency determines that that chemical substance or mixture presents an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment, And the law was established to protect the public and the natural world from the increasing intrusion into the environment of chemical substances from our increasingly industrial society.
And so our petition established I think in considerable detail that greenhouse gases and fossil fuels, which are the primary sources of the overconcentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now, especially carbon dioxide and methane, and some of the other greenhouse gases as well, clearly impose an unreasonable risk of
injury to help them the environment. In fact, President Biden, both before he became president as candidate and then also as president, has referred to the climate crisis that's created by the over concentration of these chemicals as an existential threat to our nation and to the planet. So it's well beyond an unreasonable risk, and there are alternative which
renders the risk doubly unreasonable. So our petition called upon the agency to undertake a rule making to eliminate that unreasonable risk, and in particular, we said it should act under the statute to phase out greenhouse gas emissions and
fossil fuels. And the reason for that, as we explain in the petition, is that current global warming and current acidification of the oceans is a function not of future emissions, but of the accumulated emissions from especially since the late late nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, and so the companies that have profited the most from the ability to utilize the atmosphere as an open sewer should by right pay to at least in part, to clean up their mess.
I could never understand when I was at the agency why they would need a petition to regulate greenhouse gases under TOSCO. It's maddening that with a petition they're unwilling to do their job. TOSK is a chemical safety actor. It's supposed to keep us safe from unsafe chemicals. CO two and methane are the two most unsafe chemicals that mankind has ever been presented with. If TOSCA can't regulate those two things, I don't know what the hell it's good for. So really, all the petition does is stas
epated to its job. The science of the risk isn't particularly fancy. I mean it's the physics of a microwave oven and the chemistry of your soda stream machine. So it's not like the science is a problem. And we're already seeing the fact that these greenhouse gasses, the legacy ones that are still up there, are baking and burning the planet and acidifying the ocean.
So the risk is there.
All the elements are there. They just need to do their job absolutely.
Thanks for that. The reason we turned to this approach, well, number one, it makes sense because the law is clear on its face. If there are chemical substances and mixtures that present an unreasonable risk, the agency must act to eliminate that unreasonable risk, to the point of fidding those chemical substances and mixtures. But the reason we turn to this as well is because this is existing law, and for decades now, Congress has been at an impasse over
what to do about the climate crisis. Now, this year, with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the earlier passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Democratic majorities in both houses did act somewhat to begin addressing the risk by amplifying investments and clean energy, and by paying for additional research and development and deployment of carbon negative technologies to remove or learn how to remove excess greenhouse
gases from the atmosphere. But two things. Number one, it's no better than a drop in the proverbial bucket. Number two, it's all done on the taxpayer's dime. And so in no way do these efforts begin to require the industries that have most profited from the ability to futilize the atmosphere as an open sewer to try to resolve the problem.
And that's important because unless we establish the principle that the polluter should pay to help clean up its mess then we're essentially imposing the entire burden on our children and future generations. Very needs to have a substantial stake in this on just the ability to profit from certain new tax credits. We should impose an incentive structure for them to rapidly phase out emissions and to commence to cleaning up their messages.
Do you want to comment on the IRA, It's fine. It's fine that that it does. It does decarbonize a little bit. It certainly does provide for some decarbonization. Again, as Dan said, on a taxpayer's time and enables people who have a tax liability, so it's not everybody, but it enables people to have a tax liability to use greener energy. And that's great. But if you want to fix the problem, well, first of all, fossil fuels are part of our economic DNA, and you really can't fix
greenhouse guess problems without an economic solution. And there are two ways to limit our deduction of greenhouse gases. Number one, you can limit fossil fuel supply and you can limit fossil fuel demand. Fossil fuel demand is limited somewhat by the decarbonization. You know, people won't need as much if they've got heat pumps out there and they're using solar energy, and that's fine, but we're actually increasing a little bit fossil fuel supply through some of the aspects of the IRA.
For example, it allows power plants and industrial boilers and other folks to continue to burn coal and oil and natural gas as long as they capture some small portion
of that using carbon capture and storage. Now, city production and power production is a high cost infrastructure in low marginy, and if the taxpayer is paying for the infrastructure that's required to carbon capture, then actually we're actually making sure that we're going to be using fossil fuels far into the future, and especially since so most of the carbon that's captured is not actually sequestered initially, it's actually used
to capture gas and oil. It's hard to get to so it's actually producing more oil and gas than they would have otherwise. Plus through carbon capture and storage, if you look at the upstream and downstream emissions, you're actually only capturing forty fifty percent of the power. Plants are emitting about fifteen times the ambient levels of CO two under the best conditions of carbon capture.
I mean, we had them kind of same again with the cop negotiations, where you know, there's very little appetite for saying no more fossil fuels or no more missions.
They're also increasing the ability to drill through additional thrilling rights. I find most pernationous about the IRA that it gives people the impression that, well, we can relax because you know, we basically solve most of the problem and I'm sure it will solve the rest of it, and that's not true at all. So to me, this is sort of like government greenwashing, saying oh no, we took care of this problem. No, you didn't take care of it.
There's a lot of politicians and political reporters too that don't understand that climate policy doesn't work quite the way other policies do, or a compromise is a big win.
I think it's important not to paper over the problems that you just mentioned. Capture and storage is a good one. The reason why I think this COP was an abject failure is the same as the reason that COP twenty six in Glasgow was a failure, and that is a failure to establish as a central minimum standard that we
need to phase out fossil fuels now in Glasgow. In the Final Communica there was a sentence or a sentence fragment that called upon the parties to phase down coal, not other fossil fuels, but coal to the extent that the coal was unabated. And this year there was a movement led by India and then supported by the United States in particular John Kerry, to call for a phase down not only of coal but also oil and natural gas. But this never made it in it because of the
opposition of an number of countries. And so this is a problem, as Don pointed out, if we continue to produce and import and export and distribute and sell fossil fuels. They will be used as intended and used as intended means the release of considerable quantities of greenhouse gas missions, especially CO two, and so that takes us to CCS. Carbon capture and storage is not yet established or proven
at scale in the United States or anywhere else. Nonetheless, funding CCS projects were one central feature of the Inflation Reduction Act, and so you know, a commitment to funding more research and development and deployment of CCS that has been decided for better or for worse here in the United States. Yes, should not count to eliminate a producer obligations with respect to reducing emissions unless it's highly effective, and so we will be monitoring and pressing for that.
For example, if you are admitting fifty percent or more of the emissions that you otherwise would admit, well, then that is no solution. We need to essentially phase out all emissions and remove a share of the excess if we are to have a prayer of protecting and restoring a viable climate for our children and future generations.
Yeah, okay, I'm going to let you describe this lawsuit.
Now, so EPA rejected the petition on several grounds, some of which were quite surprising, the most surprising of which is that the EPA said that it was doing enough already with respect to the IRA and with respect to other rules that it had already enacted in rules that it was planning to enact to meet the President's goals in the reducing emissions, and they named a number of
those rules. They only provided a quantitative assessment of emissions reductions, however, from one of the measures, that is the Inflation Reduction Act, and in fact that one shows only a small, real but a small reduction from what otherwise was to occur without the IRA. They provided no spreadsheet that showed that, you know, you'll get seventeen percent from the IRA here, and you'll get you know, x percent from new tailpipe emissions here, and all that adds up to one hundred percent. No,
they didn't provide anything like that. So that is one of the basis of our lawsuit that they not only did it fail to prove what they asserted, they didn't even attempt to make any such showing. And furthermore, that's not even the standard that's relevant under the law. The standard under the Toxic Substance Control Act is not that you need to reduce the chemicals to the point that
any particular ministration has indicated it seeks to do. You need to act to confront the unreasonable risk until the point that you've eliminated that unreasonable risk, and that is
a much more stringent standard. In any event, we sued twelve asking the Court in the District of Oregon for Eugene to itself determine that greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuels present an unreasonable risk of injury to health of the environment, and therefore, on that basis to instruct the Environmental Protection Aidency to open up the rule making that we requested in the petition, that is, the remedy that Congress provided for in Section twenty one of the Toxic
Substances Control Act. And the Court is supposed to take its own fresh look at the relevant facts. Do carbon dioxide, methane, nitros oxide HFCs, and the other greenhouse gases and their principal sources fossil fuels, do they present an unreasonable risk of injury to health through the environment or not? And if they do, then it should compel the Agency to undertake a rule making under TOSCA to address that risk.
Again, what really enraged me is is not only did they not provide the information to show that what they were doing was actually going to be enough, they asked us to provide the information that it wasn't going to be enough. They said, you know, in your lawsuit, you didn't show that all the things that we're doing and we intend to do aren't going to be enough. I mean, which just crazy. They're not only asking us to approve
a negative, they're asking us to read their minds. What it boils down to is they said, don't worry about it. We've got this handled. And that's the sort of response that you give to your spouse when you're standing on a stool instead of a step ladder to change your light bulb. No, no, I have this under control. This
is completely safe. It's not what you say. When the future of the planet hangs in balance, you've got to be pretty damn sure that you do have it under control enough to demonstrate how you have it under control. And they didn't do that. Mm hmm.
So now you've filed asume, is there any kind of different argument that it's making and what could it compel the EPA to do so?
I mean, another thing that we pointed out was that it's not plaintiffs spurred into establish exactly what the rule should be. That's the function for the agency. In the course of rule making under the statute, they should be going out to the public and trying to call the best ideas as to how this actually should be done,
including reaching out to communities around the country. And so, had they done what they should have, which is to have granted the petition, they should have gone to highly impacted communities or communities where there are scientific bodies, where people have been thinking through these issues. And you know, basically they should have gone out to America to figure out how best to proceed. And there's you know, a procedure for that. It's in the statute. It's called an
advanced notice of rule making where they would see input. Well, they didn't do that. We, by the way, decided that if they're not going to do it, we will do
it to the extent that we have resources. And so on November one, eleven days before we filed the lawsuit, we actually held the public hearing in Boulder, Colorado, in conjunction with the City of Boulder in city council chambers, and twenty experts from the around the world actually testified, some in person and some by zoom, and you can find the full record of that at Cprclimate dot R.
We provided that record to the Environmental Protection Agency. That's the sort of thing that the agency should be doing
in any event. We in our petition and in the lawsuit both are reserved the right to provide additional input to the agency in conjunction with that rulemaking under TOSCA or other existing EPA authority, it needs to act so as to phase out fossil fuel emissions, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, and in addition, they need to ensure the removal of a substantial mount of the overburden of atmospheric CO two and methae, because unless that is done, we will not
be able to reverse the present crisis in sufficient time to preserve, for example, nature as we've come to know it. We need to do both, and the agency has the authority to commence that entire project by utilizing the authorities that we laid out in the lawsuit.
Amy, you asked what else was new, and there's a couple of things. The IRA is new. It's not in the petition because it was passed after we'd filed, so we talk about that, and that's sort of brand new. The other thing, in twenty fifteen, I did a petition EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate CO
two because of ocean acidification. And I did that as sort of a workaround because you know, there are a lot of screwy climate deniers out there, but nobody could really deny the fact that the oceans were actually being cidified. And EPA responded to that petition by saying, don't worry,
we're handling ocean acidification. That was in twenty fifteen. We didn't follow a civil suit, and I think one of the main reasons was because we thought a judge would give difference to the fact that the agency was promising that in fact, it was unnecessary for them to regulator under TOSCA because trust me, we have it handled. Now. This may sound familiar because that's exactly what they said
this time. So they didn't have a secret plan last time, and they don't have a secret plan this time, so that's sort of new.
Also, in their rejection in twenty fifteen of Don's petition, they said that the Toxic Substances the Control Act does not apply to greenhouse gases because they said greenhouse gases like CO two are mere byproducts of other activity. There was no support in the statute for that, and in fact, that was just plain wrong. One of the nice things about their current letter of rejection, however, is that they admit that the Toxic Substances Control Act is available to
control greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse gas polution. So we point out in the lawsuit that the Agency admits to that. And the other thing that the Agency admits to that we pointed out in our complaint is that the scientific evidence that we laid out in the petition is of sufficient quantity and robustness to have been essentially on par with the evidence that they used in two thousand and nine to ground the endangerment finding which kicked off the
agency's restrictions on tailpipe emissions from autos and light trucks. Nonetheless, in their letter rejection, they did not decide one way or the other whether greenhouse gas emissions present a unreasonable risk of injury to health in the environment. They neatly avoided that central question, do.
You think you might see interveners like the American Petroleum Institute or the US Chamber, any of these folks that have intervened in other climate cases.
I think that it's a possibility, but I don't want to talk about that before it happens. Prepared for all eventualities. But you know, the agency does not need their help. This is an agency determination and it should be made on the question of risk and risk alone.
That kind of answer is the next thing I was going to ask you, which is, to what extent does it seem possible that this response from them came in the wake of West Virginia versus EPA, And maybe the EPA is thinking, oh, if we make a rule on greenhouse gases, it's going to end up in the Supreme Court. And I wonder if you think that played a role.
Well, I don't want to speak for the agency on that. I think it's possible, although the words West Virginia did not appear in their letter of rejection, but I'd like to talk to it more generally. A number of the rules that the agency is contemplating or maybe contemplating, are based on provisions of law that are far less particular as to the agency's specific duties than it's Toxic Substances Control Act. Like take, for example, the revision of the Clean Air Act that was at issue in the West
Virginia versus EPA case. There, the Obama administration built its Clean Power Plan on the basis of a provision that that was quite general if you go back and read the majority opinion. But here, under specifically Section six of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Agency is required, not permitted, but is required to impose requirements to ensure that any
such unreasonable risk from these chemical substances are eliminated. And so, in fact, I think that the West Virginia decision provides a very strong argument for action under the Toxic Substances Control Act if they want to do anything serious about the climate crisis at all. So, if they intend to seriously enact a full fledged decarbonization program in the United States, then you wanted to be based on a firm legal foundation. And that's what we had in mind with respect to
our petition for the Toxic Substance Control Act. Even before the West Virginia decision, we were concerned about this very issue because West Virginia did not arise out of whole cloth. There have been recurrent efforts by the Supreme Court over recent years to cut back EPA authority to get after the climate risk, where they were relying on statutes that are far more ambiguous on the question than TOSCA.
Yeah, let me maybe support that a little bit more. If you read the West Virginia decision mariority decision, it says that EPA is an expert in how the United States should produce the synergy because under the law it gave folks who burn coal, for example, of the opportunity to lessen their emissions by using, for example, green energy
sources to provide some of the power. And the Court said, rightly, so, really the EPA was an expert, and that Department of Energy was well, again, now we're talking about chemical safety, and EPA is exactly expert in that. It's what they do. It's also about risk, and epas experts and risk, so EPA is actually expert in this. The other thing is that EPA has an internal process that it uses to decide whether or not to regulate, and at no point in that process does it say are we handling it
through other means? That comes in later the first part of the process is is there a risk, and clearly there's a risk. The second part of the process is it a significant risk? And there is a significant risk. The third part of the processes do we need a work group for it because it may be an unreasonable risk? And the answer to that is of course, And that's what they were supposed to do. They were supposed to establish a work group. They weren't supposed to jump to
the answer and say no, no, we have this handled. Hm.
That's so interesting. Okay, so what's the next step here?
Well, we a lot happens before you get to a trial, but eventually we're headed to a trial on the question these chemicals present an unreasonable risk, and the court needs to decide that on the basis of the record that we established in court. So there will be experts testifying
on the question. This is going to be a full fledged civil lawsuit over that question, and then if the court makes the decision that we think is compelled by the reasonable evidence, then we'll be back to the point where the agency should be already, which is that the agency should be undertaking a rule making.
The last question I have for both of you is just well, two things. One, I'm curious to hear both of your opinions on why TOSCA hasn't really been used in this way by the agency. John, Like, I remember you talking about this petition in twenty fifteen and it seemed like such a no, So I'm curious what has kept them from using it. And then the other is just what you would say two people who are like, well, we don't have time for a lawsuit. We need to be tackling this issue now. And why is the EPA
dragging their feed so much? Is there any other sort of way to push them?
First of all, as to why they haven't done it before, it's because they were frightened. They got hammered really badly on the asbestos case, and I thought they had a slam dunk there, but they didn't. And it was because the courts felt they didn't do their due diligence and looking at other alternatives. They didn't look at costs and
benefits properly, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know what, Congress got rid of that requirement in the twenty sixteen amendments, So I really don't know why the Trump administration didn't jump on it. Then it's quite puzzling. The other thing is is that, yeah, lawsuit is going to take a long time. And the other hand, there's no other alternative. We can't march into EPA and hold guns to their heads. You know, they're going to do what they're going to do,
but we have to compel them. They could, in fact, because of fear of the lawsuit, or because of a ground swell of support for the lawsuit, decide that they made a mistake and maybe they ought to revisit this, and maybe they would open up a work group and they ought to hold some more public hearings and find
out what people really think. So that's basically what I have to say that, as far as I know, I can't think of any other mechanism because they still need a legal mechanism to deal with the fossil fuel companies, to deal with emissions, and this is the only one I see. It's what it was designed to do. TOSCO was designed to fill in when other authorities weren't working. And if there was ever a situation where other authorities weren't working, it's climate change.
Yeah, there's no question, but that we know what needs to be done, and so does the agency. So I mean, it is embarrassing to have to point this out, but to have hid behind the type of that they are doing enough already when they know that that is not true. That's not a position that the United States and the Agency need to retain. The Agency has a track record to its credit of sometimes reconsidering past preliminary decisions or past decisions in the light of new evidence and new information.
And here there is new information they have the standard wrong. And the United States now has a new strong position with respect to the need to do something serious about fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. And there's the information that the international system under the Unit Nations FREMEW or Convention on Climate Chain is going to be ineffective on these central questions unless some major nation or group of
nations takes leadership. The combination, for example, of the United States and the European Union could provide just that leadership, but it needs to be more than words. And so here the United States could match its rhetoric by an example by making itself an example of good behavior to seriously address the crisis.
I understand why fossil fuel companies don't want to do anything about climate change. But I don't understand why the EPA would be citing the idea of doing something.
About it, I should say. On the other hand, however, the statute was used for just this purpose, to commence the phase out of florocarbons CFC's, and under a rule promulgated by the agency, I think, even without a citizen's petition, but I'm not sure about that where they so yeah, so there you go, don I mean, back in nineteen seventy eight, the agency was able to act even without a citizens group coming forward, and they did it for
two reasons. The principal reason that they cited in their draft rule and their fin rule was to address a potent ozone depleting chemical CFCs, because there was concern they're still concerned, but now we've started to address it substantially that the ozone layer was thinning and was going to lead to serious environmental and public health consequences. But number two, they said in their rule that they were doing this because CFCs are a potent global warming forcing agent. And
so there you go. You have a administrative precedent using the same statute against a greenhouse gas that is, you know, distributed worldwide, and so it's it's a tremendous precedent from which the agency can build.
I have a lot of friends at DPA, and hopefully when this is all over, I'll still have a lot of friends at EPA. But the thing Touring Member is is that EPA isn't a monelith. I mean, there's lots of different patents there. And I would bet that ninety percent of the employees there in staffers because those guys they're working at EPA, most of them because they're environmentalists, would love to do this. But I think this was a political decision that we have the IRA we can
ease off a little bit now. And I believe that we weren't given a fair trial in the agency, and the decision was made beforehand that we need to find a way to shut this down. And they found a bunch of reasons. And that's why the reasons aren't very good, because there are no good reasons.
It's one other thing that's worthy of mention because they mentioned it in their letter rejection and they say that this is not one of our major reasons. But we also want to say that were severely underfunded.
I was just gonna say that I've heard this about the methane rule too, and I know Senator of White House has already brought this up, like, Hey, this new and improved and much more stringent rule is great, but it's not going to mean anything if we don't have the resources to actually for it. And I think that that is kind of a recurring thing that you do. Right. They need to be funded and staffed enough to actually enforce these laws.
Every time there's a new administration, they scramble everything they do. They basically says, all right, these are our new priorities. You guys aren't doing this. You guys are now doing that, and they spread around resources and you've got to triage this. You have to say, what's the biggest risk facing the American people at.
A globe right now?
And it's climate change, And you know, we're going to just stop doing some of these other things even though they're mandated by law, because this is mandated by law too, and it's way more important.
Yeah, And what they have been doing and what they're planning to do pales and importance with this overriding question. And so you know, if it's necessary for them to get additional resources to undertake this rulemaking, which I'm not quite sure it is, but if it is necessary, well, then they should seek a budget augmentation for the purpose or reallocation for the purpose. We can't let something as parochial or as basic as whether the agency has the
resources to do in adequate rulemaking. Particularly this problem has been studied so much by the US government and by other agencies and by private organizations, and every single national Academy of science is on the planet. You know, we can't let that impair us from acting well.
And also, isn't it true that getting on top of this would also get on top of so many of the other airpoints that APA has to deal with too, right, I mean, it's not like these are mutually exclusive things.
No, And we point that out in our Magnus opus, the part two of our petition that you know, just from particulates alone, it's a substantial threat to public health. I mean, we're already overdue. We will be stemming far worse problems with respect to global warming and ocean a certification, the potential collapse of the food web, the you know, tremendous imposition on human and natural systems, including agriculture, and the potential loss of major cities along the coastlines, including
in the United States. So yeah, we're in it for a world of hurt unless we get serious, and this is the most straightforward way we know of doing it.
That's it for this time. I'll be posting updates on these cases as they happen to our website at Drilled podcast dot com and possibly to the podcast feed as well. Make sure that you're subscribed to our newsletter at Drilled podcast dot com to get breaking news as well as our weekly roundup of climate coverage. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Drilled is an original Critical
Frequency production. Our producer is Sarah Ventry. Sound design, mixing and mastering are by Peter Duff, who also wrote our original score. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project, and the show is reported, written and hosted by me Amy Westervelt.