Diana Furchtgott-Roth
After years of magical thinking, America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to see the forest for the trees again. Administrator Lee Zeldin announced this week that the EPA is reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants.
This is massive. The endangerment finding underpins regulations on cars and the power sector. If it were overturned, Donald Trump could reverse costly environmental regulations put in place without explicit Congressional approval over the past decade and a half, reducing the costs of electricity and transportation.
The history of the endangerment finding dates from 2007, during the presidency of George W Bush. The Supreme Court interpreted the Clean Air Act to give the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) if the agency decided that these gases from particular sources caused pollution and endangered the public.
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Fast forward to 2009, when Barack Obama’s EPA concluded that six greenhouse gases endangered public health, allowing the agency to regulate emissions of these gases under the Clean Air Act. This “endangerment finding” triggered an onslaught of EPA climate regulations that spread to Europe and sparked the international net zero movement. This raised manufacturing costs in the West and encouraged offshoring to Asia, without necessarily reducing global emissions.
The endangerment finding used data from the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the intervening 18 years, more data have become available, and the EPA is seeking to reconsider whether greenhouse gases are having the consequences predicted in 2009. The IPCC has written a Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2022, with updated conclusions.
In addition, new Supreme Court decisions have limited the discretion granted to cabinet agencies. Executive branch agencies must hew to the letter of the law, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/commentary/americas-trillion-dollar-deregulation-could-be-dagger-the-heart