The Trump administration Tuesday followed through on its plan to get rid of a key 2009 scientific finding by the EPA that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and well-being. Reversing the rule will have the effect of doing away with the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide and other gases that cause global warming — but first, the whole mess will have to survive court challenges, which could take years. That won’t prevent this lawless administration from continuing to act as if climate science is already illegal, as it has since Inauguration Day, when Donald Trump declared climate change null and void.
When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in March that the agency would “review” (kill) the basis for climate regulations, he bragged, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Fittingly, when Zeldin announced the semi-finalized version (there are 30 days for public comments, get going!) of the new rule Tuesday, he spoke at a shrine to the new dominant religion, a truck dealership in Indiana.
The original 2009 “endangerment finding” formally summed up the scientific consensus — which hasn’t changed since then! — that greenhouse gases “endanger public health and welfare.” Under the Clean Air Act, that finding obligates the EPA to limit how much of those harmful gases are spewed into the atmosphere, just as it regulates other dangerous air pollutants.
The 2009 endangerment finding has a very colorful history, much of it green smudged with coal dust and streaks of crude oil. It was rooted in a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act; that ruling directed George W. Bush’s EPA to stop fucking around and make a formal determination as to whether greenhouse gases endanger human health or welfare.
Bush’s EPA — again, under George W. Bush — finished its assessment in 2007, determining that greenhouse gases are indeed not healthy for children and other living things. Notoriously, however, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget — ah, there’s the George W. Bush administration we know and … know — refused to open the email with the EPA finding, leaving it to whoever won the 2008 presidential election. We shit you not!
After the Bushies finally departed, leaving pretzel crumbs and forever wars all over the place, Barack Obama’s EPA got to work fulfilling the Supremes’ 2007 order, writing its 2009 finding based on over 100 peer reviewed scientific papers on climate change, the work of hundreds of scientists. It has since then been the basis of all EPA’s regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, including its Biden-era regulations on vehicles and on power plants.
Trump’s first administration was too slapdash to actually take on the endangerment finding. But over Biden’s four years, as the US finally started taking action against climate change, the fossil fuel industry got its hired guns to work writing some executive orders for the former president. And voila! Trump’s first day EO enshrining fossil fuels as the only truly American energy source therefore ordered the EPA to reconsider the “legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding. It was a priority that came straight out of Project 2025.
Zeldin claimed Tuesday that the 2009 finding was very bad and not scientific in the first place, insisting that Obama’s EPA had overstepped the authority of the Clean Air Act, because reasons. (They are bullshit reasons, as we’ll see in a moment.) Zeldin said that Congress would have to pass a law telling the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, because “We [the EPA] do not have that power on our own to decide as an agency that we are going to combat global climate change because we give ourselves that power.”
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains, the central claim of the new finding (on which, again, we have 30 days to submit not-obscene, non-sarcastic public comment) is an entirely made-up limit on the scope of the Clean Air Act, insisting that it was written to
target air pollution that endangers public health “through local or regional exposure,” and therefore that it cannot be used to rein in greenhouse gases “based on global climate change concerns.” Richard Revesz, a professor of law at New York University and former Biden official, told me this was “breathtakingly broad,” and said that it was “inconsistent with 55 years of regulation under the Clean Air Act. That limitation was never understood to be there.”
While the proposal is at it, it also throws anything else at the endangerment finding that its authors think might stick, suggesting that the EPA was obligated to consider the costs of implementing limits on greenhouse gases (the Clean Air Act has no such provisions) or that the finding should have considered possible upsides to a hotter planet instead of just the gloomy stuff like mass extinctions and making large parts of the planet inhospitable to human life. (Hey, most of those spots are outside the USA!!!!) It even pretends that the scientific evidence that climate change threatens public health isn’t very solid, although the science hasn’t changed.
What has changed is that the Trump administration hired a bunch of fringe “experts” to opine that scientific consensus is flawed, and that climate change is probably no big, if humans are even contributing to it at all. Those credentialed cranks, whose lies have been debunked again and again by real scientists, barfed out a new “report” released by the Energy Department Tuesday as well. Not surprisingly, its fossil-friendly findings are also cited in the EPA’s finding overturning the real science. (Remember, for the next 30 days you can send in public comments detailing why the new finding should be rejected in whole.)
The Energy Department report truly is a vile document, claiming that the “conventional narrative on climate change” is, oops, mostly wrong, but the entire world scientific community forgot to notice. Even the brief online summary sounds like something straight from the Heartland Institute, the oil industry front that a decade ago put up those billboards warning that the Unabomber, Charles Manson, and Osama bin Laden all believed in global warming. Oh, nostalgia!
The report’s cover sheet screed claims that, contrary to real peer-reviewed science, “carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” It also says that anything the US might do to try to reduce carbon emissions would have “undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays,” so why even bother? Let’s make lots of money instead, but without the Pet Shop Boys’ ironic, jaded detachment.
As Texas A & M atmospheric science professor Andrew Dessler explains in a brief initial Blusesky post, the “report” isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a scientific document. It’s written by intentionally selected climate contrarians and downplayers, using cherry-picked details that only present unresolved questions in current science. The “report” should therefore
be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide. Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence. This is a fundamental departure from the norms of science.
A lawyer is expected to represent their client zealously and selectively, presenting only the information that strengthens their case and leaving it to the opposing counsel to present the other side. […]
In science, the standard is the opposite. Scientists are obligated to engage with the full range of evidence, especially that which might contradict their hypotheses.
It’s garbage, but it’s written by the people in power, so now it’s garbage policy, although we’ll point out that the garbage report has its own 30 day public comment period. That sucker is also worth reading, since it includes its own hilarious lies like the claim that climate reports linking global warming to increasing wildfires overlook “forest management practices.” So yeah, raking the forests is now part of the official “science” against climate change.
What now? We fight both of these abominations tooth and nail, especially the attempt to roll back the endangerment finding, as former Obama White House attorney and Harvard Environmental Law professor Jody Freeman tells Heatmap. First, there’s the public comments process, which by law the EPA must respond to (and will, dishonestly). But the more, and more detailed, the comments, the longer the process may take, and that will be months. After that, when the final (unscientific) rule is published, likely next year, come the lawsuits.
These rules go to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals because that’s what the Clean Air Act says, and usually it would take about a year or so for a D.C. Circuit decision to happen. So now you’re in 2027. You can see the timeline on this stretching out. And if you ultimately think this could go to the Supreme Court, you can imagine that’s another year away. So basically, for the rest of President Trump’s term, you really shouldn’t expect to see enforcement or action on federal climate rules.
That’s good as far as it goes, but after that, it all depends on where the Supreme Court goes. It might issue a limited ruling that could be reversed by a future EPA, but the Trump administration will undoubtedly push for, and might get, a maximalist ruling that makes it impossible for a subsequent administration to regulate greenhouse emissions via the EPA, in which case Congress would have to pass a law specifically instructing the agency to do so.
In other words, as with climate change itself, we’re kind of screwed, but we still have some control over how deeply screwed we are. And that’s while we’ll keep fighting.
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[AP / WaPo (gift link) / Heatmap News / Public comment notice / NPR / Department of Energy]
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