This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 17, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How would a President Romney reign in the EPA? At present, it's not clear that

there's very much he can do. Pat Michael's director of the Center for the Study of Science

at the Cato Institute comments.

A President Romney will probably try to get EPA to reduce its regulatory impact on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions.

But it's unclear how much he can really do.

In 2007, the Supreme Court held that if the EPA found that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,

quote, endangered human health and welfare, then according to that court the EPA must

regulate it, presumably to the point at which it no longer endangers. Now that means that the president can't just simply say no you no longer have to

regulate the EPA would have to turn around its finding of endangerment.

And that is a very difficult task because they were very meticulous about the scientific and technical background that they used to create the initial endangerment finding

which came out of the Obama administration in 2009.

So what did how did they come to this endangerment finding?

Well they relied heavily on a couple of documents

one of which is a report from something called the U.S. Global Change Research Program

that was called Global Climate Impacts in the United States.

And I was a reviewer of that report and I can... in the something like of all the summary documents on climate change I have ever reviewed, this is the

worst. There is not a paragraph that can't be debated. In fact, indeed, some sentences seem to be missing a lot of basic science.

Well, I took that as a guideline and produced a report that's going to be coming out very

soon that looks exactly like the report that the EPA relied upon.

The new Cato document, which is simply called the addendum to the US GCRP report, looks like it, it flows like it, where there are key findings in the government report.

...