Coal Company CEO Threatens To Sue EPA For ‘Lying’ About Climate Change

By Emily Atkin June 10, 2014 at 5:08 pm Updated: June 10, 2014 at 7:13 pm

The owner of the largest independent coal producer in the U.S. is threatening to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over its new regulations on carbon emissions from existing coal plants, saying the agency has been lying about the existence of global warming, and that the earth is actually getting colder.

In an extended profile published last month, Murray Energy Corp. founder Robert Murray told WV Executive that the EPA’s claims that climate change exists violates the federal Data Quality Act, which requires agencies to rely on quality, objective information to inform its decisions.

“Under the act, they are obligated to tell the truth, and they are not telling the truth about global warming,” Murray reportedly said. “They are not telling hardly any truth about the science. The earth has actually cooled over the last 17 years, so under the Data Quality Act, they’ve actually been lying about so-called global warming.”

Murray added, “This lawsuit will force them to not just take data from the environmentalists and publish it, as they have been doing, but to review that data and make sure it’s accurate.”

Of course, the EPA does not just take data from environmentalists to inform its position on climate change. A comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed research shows a 97 percent consensus among scientists that global warming is real and primarily driven by humans. And the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, a massive global effort to compile and analyze climate research by scientists and experts around the world, found that there is a 95 percent likelihood that human activities drove 74 percent of the observed global warming since 1950.

The argument that the earth is cooling has also been thoroughly debunked by peer-reviewed research, which shows both a slight increase in surface temperatures and an enormous increase in the temperature of the ocean, which fuels arctic ice melt and sea level rise.

A spokesperson for Murray Energy confirmed to ThinkProgress on Tuesday that Murray does believe the earth is cooling, and that the company is planning sue the EPA over its statements.

Murray Energy has already sued the EPA in March over what it called its “war on coal,” claiming the agency failed to evaluate how air pollution regulations would affect jobs in the coal industry.