According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), “Emails show the agency took dictation from green lobbies in possible violation of the law.”

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that this trio and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule. Their inside man was Michael Goo, who worked at the NRDC before becoming the EPA’s Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy. The emails show intense 2011 communications between Mr. Goo and high-level officials at the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Task Force. Mr. Goo used a private Yahoo email account to send multiple drafts of his options memo to these outside groups, which returned them with draft instructions.

The WSJ reports that they have enough evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The New York Times gave us the first inkling of  this situation. The Times reported that in 2014 three environmentalists with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote a ‘blueprint’ that ‘influenced’ the greenhouse gas rules. Their names? – Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins.

“That wasn’t the half of it,” says the WSJ.

The emails show Lashof, Doniger, Hawkins and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule.

As reported in Sunshine State News,

Here’s what Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA assistant administrator in the Bush Administration, had to say. “I’ve been involved with EPA regulations for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. It is remarkable that a senior official would use a private email account to evade federal law and secretly give an outside group a seat at the table when regulations are being developed.”

The EPA emails are extensive and egregious.

When the Journal asked the Sierra Club to respond, its spokesman declined. Goo has since left the EPA and “a spokesman for (Goo) dismissed our questions as ‘a red herring’ raised by ‘a professional climate skeptic.'”

The EPA pooh-poohed the story. The “Clean Power Plan was developed through an extensive public outreach process,” they said, “with hundreds of stakeholders at public hearings. For an action that generated 4.3 million public comments, to imply that one group or person had any undue influence on the Clean Power Plan’s development is ridiculous and absurd.”

To hear the EPA tell it, Goo shared his work product with all those commenters.

The WSJ gives credit for exposing the emails to Chris Horner, an attorney for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. Horner pursued the FOIA requests as relentlessly as Javert pursued Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables.”

Read more HERE