Once again, the Obama administration has sought to impose sweeping “change” by any means necessary. On the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an “endangerment” finding, determining that greenhouse gases constitute a potential threat to human health.

The EPA issued this finding despite the recent public controversy regarding the potential manipulation of data at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Despite recent evidence calling into question the data and research upon which the EPA’s endangerment finding was based, the agency issued the finding anyway, providing a basis for the administration’s efforts to impose by regulation potentially damaging restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions that it could not obtain through legislation.

What does this action portend? First, one can expect that any regulatory action by the EPA will be subject to legal challenge. The agency’s highly unusual action of issuing its findings without allowing comment on the new evidence calling into question the underlying data will undoubtedly generate grounds for opposing enactment of any regulations based on such findings.

According to the EPA, the 60-day comment period generated more than 380,000 public comments, demonstrating that the findings constitute a matter of significant public interest. The EPA’s failure to reopen the comment period to allow public discussion of emerging evidence regarding the reliability of the research upon which it relied is telling. Once again, it demonstrates that the advocates of global warming do not want to submit the matter to open debate.

The EPA’s finding, and regulatory program in general, is also likely to generate private litigation, albeit with a different purpose altogether. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are undoubtedly salivating at the prospect of a series of EPA findings from a sympathetic administration suggesting that private industry is responsible for causing “climate-related” injuries.

Not only do the EPA findings provide an excuse for imposing potentially damaging regulatory restrictions and measures designed to increase government revenues, but they also provide a sop to the trial bar, which has been champing at the bit to initiate a new round of mass tort litigation.

Neither of these prospects constitutes a positive development. Environmental regulation should be based on sound science, not on ideological decision- making. Moreover, such an important subject should be left to the political branches, not unelected regulators.

Nor should the EPA’s regulatory efforts be used as an excuse to generate new private civil litigation, which can only add to the economic challenges already facing our nation. Such litigation may benefit the lawyers who seek to profit from civil lawsuits, but in the process many others are likely to suffer.

Douglas Smith is an attorney and adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.