EPA’s proposed action will worsen the “climate crisis” and “endanger people’s health,” the Sierra Club laments. It will “increase the suffering of communities that are overburdened by the dirty co-pollutants caused by burning fossil fuels,” claims Al Gore.
These and other overwrought reactions to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to reconsider the so-called “Endangerment Finding” underscore the shenanigans that EPA utilized to make that finding – and why it must be reexamined and reversed.
The bottom line is simple. EPA never had congressional authorization to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Moreover, EPA used its self-aggrandizing decision to launch perhaps the most egregious regulatory overreach in history.
The 1970 Clean Air Act specifically authorizes EPA to regulate sulfur dioxide, ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide and other named pollutants that “endanger public health or welfare.” Over the ensuing years, regulations and technologies have reduced emissions of these pollutants by 70-99% from motor vehicles and coal-fired power plants.
The Act never mentioned carbon dioxide, and Congress had rejected previous opportunities to add it.
However, several states sued EPA, claiming that greenhouse gases were causing dangerous climate change and thereby threatening the health and wellbeing of their citizens. In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that EPA could regulate those gases as well, if the agency found GHGs “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger” Americans’ health or welfare.
In 2009, the Obama EPA issued a highly controversial finding that relied on cherry-picked “scientific studies” purporting to show that manmade CO2 was the primary factor in driving global temperature increases, climate change, more frequent and intense hurricanes, tornadoes, storms and droughts, sea level rise, etc. – and thus threatened people’s health and wellbeing.
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EPA ignored voluminous studies that contradicted these claims; demonstrated that rising CO2 helps crops, grasslands and forests grow better, faster and with less water; and showed that Earth’s temperature and climate are changing only marginally, and mostly because of natural forces like the sun and cloud cover.
Other studies explained how our health and welfare depend significantly on the energy, petrochemicals, heating, air conditioning and transportation that EPA’s actions were making less available and less affordable.
It’s basic science that humans and animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide – and plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen. Without this “miracle molecule,” this trace gas (0.04% of the atmosphere), nearly all life on Earth would cease to exist.
But the Obama and Biden EPA paid no attention to these facts. The agency quickly employed its Endangerment Finding to justify regulating almost any activity that uses or burns carbon or hydrocarbon energy, or otherwise emits GHGs.
The agency started with vehicles and coal-burning generating plants, added gas-fired power plants, and then began applying its regulatory overkill to oil and gas production and refining, cement kilns, factories, and even dairy farms, apartment buildings, and other components of our lives, livelihoods and wellbeing.
In the name of preventing a manmade climate crisis, EPA used its bootstrapped GHG authority to compel America to convert its fossil-fuel electricity generation system to weather-dependent, grid-destabilizing, economy-disrupting wind and solar energy; and to convert gas home and water heaters, and gasoline lawn mowers and vehicles, to electric models powered by this unreliable, inadequate electricity supply.
EPA likewise ignored the impacts that sprawling wind and solar installations have on habitats, birds, bats and other wildlife; the automobile and grid-scale batteries that can catch fire, emit toxic pollutants and kill people; and recurring blackouts that disrupt business and lives – and kill people when blackouts occur on torrid or freezing cold days.
The agency also glossed over the unprecedented mining for metals and minerals to build windmills, solar panels, transmission lines, transformers and batteries – often by Chinese companies that take advantage of cheap and child labor, nonexistent workplace safety and pollution control rules, and coal that generates 61% of China’s electricity.
All these are vital aspects of any credible definition of human health and welfare.
Simply put, it is not carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases and climate change that endanger us. It is the ever-more-draconian rules that EPA was implementing before EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin arrived.
The Endangerment Finding was a travesty of science and the epitome of regulatory overreach. It is a perfect target for Supreme Court justices who have already begun reining in the Deep State.
So let Friends of the Regulatory State sue EPA for daring to reconsider and rescind the Endangerment Finding. With the current makeup of the Supreme Court being what it is, and bolstered by West Virginia and Loper Bright rulings that have not been friendly to radical climate ideologues, one can almost hear Lee Zeldon channel his inner Dirty Harry and quip, “Go ahead, make my day.”
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Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
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