Virginia and Alabama crank up legal pressure on EPA carbon ruling

The stream of legal challenges to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s right to regulate carbon emissions is threatening to become a torrent after Virginia and Alabama became the latest states to launch legal action against the watchdog.

The EPA is now facing at least five separate petitions challenging its recent endangerment finding, which ruled that greenhouse gas emissions represent a threat to human health and as such can be regulated under the existing Clean Air Act.

Texas also announced this week that it has launched a legal challenge, along with a coalition of business lobby groups including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce announced last week that it too is taking legal action, alleging the EPA breached various protocols when reaching its decision.

While a number of the suits are expected to focus on the EPA's legal right to regulate emissions and whether or not the Clean Air Act is an appropriate mechanism for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, Virginia attorney general Kenneth T Cuccinelli II indicated the state's legal action would seek to challenge the findings of climate scientists.

In a statement referencing the so-called Climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, Cuccinelli's office accused the EPA of acting in "an arbitrary and capricious fashion" and relying too heavily on reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that attribute climate change to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

"There are significant issues with the EPA basing much of its endangerment finding on IPCC reports," said Cuccinelli in the statement. "The IPCC reports were produced without regard to US data standards and thus lack the transparency and data quality standards that the EPA should be demanding in the reports it bases it's [sic] endangerment findings on."

He added: "the EPA was driven by political concerns and used questionable scientific reports to reach an outcome driven by politics… We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground."

The flurry of legal challenges could have major repercussions for the Obama administration's climate change strategy, which has regarded the power to regulate emissions through the Clean Air Act as a crucial "plan B" should its attempts to pass a specific climate change bill fail.