Center for American Progress helped craft EPA talking points, emails show

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A prominent left-wing group helped formulate Environmental Protection Agency talking points designed to sell a controversial regulatory scheme to skeptical journalists, internal emails show.

The emails show Joseph Goffman, the senior counsel of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, circulating talking points from Center for American Progress climate strategy director Daniel Weiss among EPA colleagues attempting to sell the agency's controversial power plant regulations to a New York Times reporter.

Weiss emailed Goffman in September 2013 with a series of suggestions for convincing the Times' Matt Wald of the commercial viability of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, a vital component of the agency's stringent power plant emissions regulations.

Five minutes later, Goffman sent an email to five colleagues in his office and the agency's public affairs division. Unredacted language in the email is identical to language in Weiss' list of talking points.

The Environment & Energy (E&E) Legal Institute obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. Chris Horner, a senior legal fellow at E&E, said they show extensive behind-the-scenes collaboration between EPA and third-party groups that support the regulations.

"The chief lawyer tasked with making the global warming agenda happen cuts and pastes Team Soros arguments and strategies into emails and sends them to colleagues as his own," Horner said in an email.

Weiss, who is now the senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters, another influential green group, did not respond to a request for comment.

Goffman took the lead in crafting the EPA's legal justification for its power plant rules, which are expected to hit coal-fired power plants hardest. Laws require federal regulations to be commercially viable, so the EPA needed to show it was possible for coal plants to comply with the rule.

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