As Republicans in Congress begin an effort to roll back the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse, Democrats released documents this week showing that President George W. Bush’s EPA administrator also favored regulation.

Stephen L. Johnson wrote Bush a letter in 2008 saying the carbon dioxide posed a  danger to the country under the Clean Air Act, Felicity Barringer writes in Green, a New York Times blog on energy and the environment. Johnson’s letter said, “the state of the latest climate change science does not permit a negative finding, nor does it permit a credible finding that we need to wait for more research.” Barringer adds:

“The documents recall a slightly surreal bureaucratic back and forth in late 2007 in which Mr. Johnson sent a proposed endangerment finding to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials refused to open the e-mail with the attachment.

“That refusal effectively stymied the agency’s efforts to make a formal endangerment finding.”