The lengthy report details a variety of instances of lobbyists for special interest groups helping to push EPA regulations and decisions. It also notes that members of these groups virtually infiltrated the EPA and worked from within to circulate materials to colleagues and continue to advance the environmentalist agenda. Items on that agenda range from orchestrating public hearings to the targeting of individual power plants through new EPA standards.

The collection of e-mails outlines a close relationship between environmental groups and senior EPA officials, many of whom came from those environmental groups. One such relationship is that between Michael Goo, recently head of the EPA Office of Policy and a former Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) lobbyist, and John Coequyt, a top Sierra Club lobbyist. According to the e-mails, Coequyt supplied materials directly to individual activists within EPA, even helping EPA keep a score for “internal use” of coal plants to shut down. Coequyt saw to it that plans to build new coal plants ultimately did not come to fruition.

Coequyt wrote to Goo and another EPA staffer to pressure the EPA into adopting regulations so strict that coal plants that had already received construction permits could not be built. “Attached is a list of plants that the companies shelved because of uncertainty around GHG regulations. If a standard is set that these plants could meet, there is a not small chance that they [sic] company could decide to revive the proposal,” Coequyt wrote.

On many occasions, Coequyt met with Goo at the nearby Marriott Hotel, purposely avoiding EPA headquarters so that they did not have to detail their discussions in EPA’s visitor logs.

FK –  Who created the Eco-commie protection agency? We need a few basic environmental laws that hold corporate polluters personally and criminally responsible for what they do, not a bureaucratic system whose real purpose is the destruction of Human Liberty and property rights.