Confident that it can, once again, breach the constitutional separation of powers and bypass Congress, this time, by recasting a complex multilateral environmental treaty as a simple executive agreement not requiring Senate approval, the Obama administration touted its climate change bona fides to the world this past week at the United Nations Climate Summit in New York. 
The President crowed about how the U.S. has significantly reduced its carbon emissions since 2006, and alluded to Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) automobile and power plant greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions control regulations triggered by EPA’s controversial 2009 Clean Air Act GHG Endangerment Findings.
Apparently, the president had been misinformed about the legal soundness of those findings and the regulations they have spawned. Indeed, White House officials should have told him that many of the climate assessments cited as scientific support for such findings did not satisfy the strict scientific peer review standards imposed by the U.S. Information Quality Act (“IQA”).
Undoubtedly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”), the U.S. government’s lead climate change agency, like EPA, would prefer to bypass the IQA if possible. The IQA requires all federal agencies to ensure the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of the scientific information that federal agencies rely upon as the basis for regulations.
As the Daily Caller and other media have reported, the nonprofit Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (“ITSSD”) has called upon EPAand NOAA, in new separately filed Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests, to produce records substantiating that the peer reviews performed of NOAA and other agency-developed climate assessments supporting EPA’s GHG Endangerment Findings had satisfied the IQA’s strict peer review standards. Neither agency has responded substantively to these requests, despite the EPA’s assessment of an estimated document search fee of more than USD $27,000.