The US Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule that greenhouse gases endanger human health, allowing it to regulate planet-warming emissions even without Congressional action, a White House official said today.
The EPA climate announcement will come as a two-week international meeting on controlling climate change kicks off in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama, who has made fighting climate change one of his top priorities, plans to attend the conference late next week as climate legislation in Congress drags behind healthcare.
The EPA said it would make the announcement at 1:15 p.m. EST (6.15 Irish time).
The EPA finding would allow the agency to issue rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, even if Congress fails to pass legislation to cut U.S. emissions of the heat-trapping gases that scientists say cause global warming.
EPA sdministrator Lisa Jackson said last month the endangerment finding was being considered by the Office of Management and Budget and that the agency was hoping for an expedited review.
The climate bill has been delayed in the US Senate as lawmakers debate healthcare, but lawmakers hope to pass a bill in the spring. Climate legislation passed narrowly in the House of Representatives in June.
Along with its final endangerment finding, the EPA also sent OMB the agency's final finding on whether cars and trucks "cause or contribute to that pollution," Ms Jackson said last month.
Ms Jackson said the government is facing a "hard deadline" of next March to let automakers know of any required increases in fuel economy standards that would affect vehicles built for the 2012 model year.
She said the EPA received more than 300,000 comments on its initial proposed public health endangerment and vehicle pollution findings that were issued last April.
Any final endangerment finding would be open for public review.
Elsewhere, The head of the UN's panel of climate scientists today strongly defended findings that humans are warming the planet, after critics said that leaked emails from a British university had undermined evidence.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a climate conference that its findings were "subjected to extensive and repeated reviews by experts as well as by governments."
The IPCC concluded in 2007 that it was at least 90 per cent certain that humans were to blame for global warming.
But climate change sceptics have seized on a series of hacked emails written by climate specialists, accusing them of colluding to suppress others' data and enhance their own.
"The evidence is now overwhelming that the world would benefit greatly from early action," Pachauri told delegates at the opening session of the Copenhagen summit.
The largest and most important UN climate change conference in history opened this morning, with diplomats from 192 nations warned that this could be the best and last chance for a deal to protect the world from calamitous global warming.
The climate change e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, were stolen by unknown hackers and spread rapidly across the Internet. Sceptics say that the emails showed that scientists had manipulated evidence.
Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, told conference delegates that the row would impact the Copenhagen talks and belief in climate science.
"The level of confidence is certainly shaken. We believe this scandal is definitely going to affect the nature of what can be fostered (in Copenhagen). The size of (economic) sacrifices must be built on a secure foundation of information which we found now is not true," a Saudi delegate said.
Another British climate research centre, the Met Office Hadley Centre, plans to publish this week data from more than 1,000 locations around the world to boost transparency and underpin evidence that the world is warming.
"We are confident (it) will show that global average temperatures have risen over the last 150 years," it said in a statement, adding that the move had the support of the University of East Anglia.
"As soon as we have all permissions in place we will release the remaining station records."
Agencies