Having declared carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases harmful pollutants, the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding has been the cornerstone of wrongheaded climate regulation. [emphasis, links added]
It impedes economic growth and destroys livelihoods, resulting from rulemaking that puts ideology ahead of science.
Empowered to impose sweeping restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from all human activity, the EPA has been free to issue unreasonable demands on electric generation, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture.
Under the Obama and Biden administrations, this regulatory cudgel hammered fossil fuels in general and coal in particular, with carbon dioxide emissions as the focus.
In the past decade, regulations have contributed to the closures of more than 40% of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, one of the most economical and reliable electricity generators.
Job losses have affected thousands of plant workers, coal miners, and employees of supporting businesses, and electricity prices and blackout risks have increased.
The endangerment finding was a response to the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled that EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act if they endangered the public.
Based on flawed analyses, the Obama administration’s EPA concluded that there was such a threat, laying a foundation for some of the agency’s most consequential regulations.
The endangerment finding influenced the Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, and stringent vehicle emissions standards nationally.
States point to the regulation to justify their climate initiatives. California has used it to defend its waiver for stricter vehicle emissions standards.
Northeastern states have relied on it to uphold the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program.
Under President Biden, the EPA imposed even stricter rules for power plants and automobiles last year to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050. Critics say a workable technology to meet emission limits for power plants does not exist.
EPA ignores much more than the feasibility of technological “solutions.”
The endangerment finding disregards complexities of climate dynamics from solar cycles, clouds, and ocean currents and relies on bad science, including computer models that empirical data have proved false.
Even the quality of global temperature records is too poor to support the rule.
More than a century of accepted science has established that the warming potential of carbon dioxide decreases as its atmospheric concentration rises.
Although often referenced by supporters of the rule, links between warming and an increase in severe weather have not been found. There are no trends of weather getting worse over time.
Of all the rule’s absurdities, none is greater than the claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is catastrophically overheating the planet.
More than a century of accepted science has established that the warming potential of carbon dioxide decreases as its atmospheric concentration rises.
This phenomenon of diminishing returns means that even doubling the amount of carbon dioxide from current levels would have only a modest effect on temperature.
“The models predicting doom from CO2 have consistently overestimated warming, yet the EPA continues to rely on them to justify its regulations,” said Judith Curry, one of many climate scientists questioning the regulation.
EPA also fails to account for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Higher levels increase plant growth and agricultural productivity through a fertilization effect, a factor in the Earth’s greening over the past several decades, as affirmed by NASA.
This has significantly improved global food security.
By extension, the EPA brushes aside the enormous contribution that hydrocarbons have made to humanity’s tenfold increase over the past 250 years through industrialization and modern agriculture.
Coal, oil, and natural gas remain critical to impoverished nations’ economic development and feeding of their people.
Mr. Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has reportedly sent the White House a recommendation on abandoning the endangerment finding.
Given the scientific shortcomings of the EPA’s “greenhouse” rule, the time has passed for its repeal. The EPA should acknowledge that carbon dioxide, two pounds of which everybody exhales daily, is not a threat to the public and should not be treated as such.
This would defang the pseudoscience of fearmongers, the lawfare emanating from the United Nations and anti-human activists, and allow a return to common sense and scientific integrity befitting a free society.
Read more at Washington Times
