This week, the Environmental Protection Agency, now under the purview of former Long Island Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin, made a big mistake by moving to formally rescind an earlier finding that greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide are dangerous to people and can therefore be regulated by the agency under the Clean Air Act. If implemented, this would, overnight, ax a decade and a half of constraints around emissions that are, no matter what Zeldin might claim, harmful to humans.
The EPA seems to be taking the position that for something to be harmful, it has to be harmful in an incredibly direct way — it has to immediately and measurably impact the health of those around it in the same way that lead or sulfur or arsenic or other harmful substances might.
It might be true that something like carbon dioxide, naturally exhaled by humans as we breathe and generally abundantly present in nature, is not something that will instantly harm our health or endanger our lives in the same way as poisons, but it is inarguable that it is dangerous on a macro scale.
It doesn’t really matter if breathing it in is not quite so terrible for us if it will eventually make the entire planet less habitable, increase the likelihood that our crops will fail and that climate change will worsen, with hotter and hotter weather. This week’s scorcher is not just a coincidence. Neither are the torrential downpours.
Zeldin knows this, obviously. He and his regulatory staff at the agency have access to all of the exhaustive and meticulous data compiled over decades of the EPA’s work showing that greenhouse emissions are major contributors to climate change, which in itself is likely the greatest man-made threat not just to prosperity to but human life itself short of maybe nuclear weapons.
The EPA’s finding in this regard dates back to 2009 and has been a guiding philosophy through Barack Obama‘s time in office, Donald Trump‘s first term and Joe Biden‘s time as president.
The reason they are making this change now after 16 years as accepted science is not because any of the underlying science has changed nor researchers come to any different conclusions, but because they understand their role to be carrying out the Trump administration’s short-term political agenda items.
These inexplicably include a state-sponsored preference for dirty energy sources of the past as opposed to the growth industry of renewables, which would not only be better for our environment but have the potential to create thousands of new American jobs. Instead, Trump made sure that incentives for these renewable technologies were wound down in the ultra-MAGA budget bill that the subservient Congress recently sent to him and is hell-bent on clearing the path for oil and gas and coal to dominate.
This isn’t a done deal, and the public will now get its chance to comment on Zeldin’s proposal. It seems likely that the administration would basically try to ignore public comments given that they are already ignoring the underlying science, but these things still make a difference.
During Trump‘s first term, many rules and regulations were struck down precisely because the administration seemed uninterested in following the normal rules and procedures of federal rule-making, including meaningfully engaging with comments and providing rational bases for their actions. While they’ve certainly attempted to represent themselves as above the law, that is not the case. If they are unable to defend this rule, it could be withdrawn or axed in court. Let’s hope so, for all our sakes.
