Editor’s Note: The following is the Heritage Foundation’s 5th Component of a Healthy National Energy Policy. The complete document, American Energy Freedom: The Basis for Economic Recovery, is attached below.
Congress should require an independent review of all scientific findings used to support current environmental regulations under the purview of the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the EPA. Congress should repeal or amend those regulations that fail to meet the scientific integrity review. In July 2010, the Obama Administration issued an executive order called the Ocean Policy Initiative that subjects all of America’s waterways and the Great Lakes to federal zoning laws. A newly created National Ocean Council will oversee “coastal and marine spatial planning.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a “Next-Generation Strategic Plan” that will use “[c]omprehensive planning to address competing uses to protect coastal communities and resources from the impacts of hazards and land-based pollution on vulnerable ecosystems.”
The EPA, a member of the National Ocean Council, could, for example, state that greenhouse gas emissions are harming the oceans, and use this avenue to regulate carbon dioxide if proposed cap-and-trade legislation does not become law. Essentially, this new unelected council bypasses Congress as well as state and local governments in determining land-based and water-based activities and allows new regulations to be established under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
A few states have enacted the Verifiable Science Act,[23] which guarantees Americans the right to access scientific data used to develop public policy. The model language of the act incorporates rights and responsibilities as follows:
Citizens have a right to access data from [government] funded studies in whole or in part, that are used for development of state law or regulation or enforcement action. Any regulations promulgated by the results of such studies shall be justified by pertinent, ascertainable, and peer-reviewed science.
Any scientific documentation, statistics, reports, or research must be made available to the public through the (provisions of the Freedom of Information Act) whenever such scientific data is used, in part or in whole, as the basis for proposed statutes, regulations, guidance documents, policy statements, official reports, legislative studies, or any other pronouncements which might carry the weight of law or which might be intended to lead directly to new regulations or statutes.[24]
Similar federal legislation would be useful to provide transparency and accountability in the rulemaking process by federal agencies.