At the direction of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day back in office, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin was charged with reconsidering whether the EPA’s finding that emissions of carbon dioxide endanger human health, welfare, or the environment (the Endangerment Finding) is valid and merits continued support.
Zeldin reported his determination and recommendations to Trump last week, but they have not been publicly released.
Critics of the federal effort to limit fossil fuel use and restrict greenhouse gas emissions in the vain effort to prevent climate change — which humans don’t control by the way — have long decried the Endangerment Finding, recognizing it serves as the foundation for nearly all federal climate rules since 2009.
The Endangerment Finding was based on a gross and unjustified expansion of the reach of the Clean Air Act as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA.
Massachusetts sued the EPA for not regulating greenhouse gas emissions, specifically carbon dioxide, from mobile sources as a pollutant causing climate change, which the state argued threatened it and its people via higher seas and worsening weather. The EPA argued that under the Clean Air Act it had no authority to regulate CO2 emissions because they weren’t considered pollution under the law.
The Court took the occasion to expand the law beyond its wording and intention, rewriting the Clean Air Act to essentially define anything emitted into the air as a pollutant and thus subject to EPA regulation if the agency finds it endangers human health. Under this interpretation of the law, when a person exhales or belches, they are polluting.
Because fossil fuels are the lifeblood of the economy, under the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the CAA, the EPA has become an authoritarian czar, with the levers of the entire economy in its hands. The U.S. Constitution countenanced no single branch of government, much less a single unaccountable agency under one branch of the government, to wield such unchecked power.
Hellbound and Down 