By Craig Rucker
One of the Trump administration’s most important executive actions is the Environmental Protection Agency’s review of the Obama EPA’s determination that carbon dioxide (CO2) endangers our health.
The Obama and Biden administrations both used the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” (EF) to justify regulating and even banning virtually anything that emits carbon dioxide: coal and gas electricity generation, gasoline and diesel vehicles, gas furnaces, water heaters, stoves and ovens, and ultimately our living standards.
How could that happen in the land of the free – the home of science, democracy and industry?
George Orwell might say the problem began with the 1984 US Supreme Court decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That ruling established “Chevron deference,” requiring that courts defer to “reasonable” government agency interpretations of ambiguous laws and statutory language.
Ambiguous laws and ambitious agencies are a dangerous combination.
EPA, for example, often collaborated with activist groups (and states) to turn accidentally or purposefully vague legislative language into powerful regulations with enormous national costs and impacts.
The Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA ruling magnified those dangers. It held that the EPA could regulate CO2 if the agency found it “causes or contributes” to “air pollution” that may be “reasonably anticipated” to “endanger public health or welfare.”
The Obama EPA jumped at the opportunity. It needed less than a year to perform a dubious analysis and issue the December 2009 Endangerment Finding – enabling the agency to control America’s electricity generation, transportation, factories, agriculture, and households.
It was the pinnacle of government control. Never before had so few bureaucrats exerted so much power over so many lives, with so little oversight by the legislative or judicial branch.
However, this expanding executive branch overreach eventually persuaded the Supreme Court to reexamine its earlier rulings.
The Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA curtailed the worst excesses. The justices ruled that federal agencies may not violate the “major questions doctrine,” which states: in the absence of clear congressional direction or authorization, agencies may not make decisions or issue regulations “of vast economic and political significance.”
EPA can hardly argue that the 1970 Clean Air Act somehow implies that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant when neither the original statute nor any subsequent amendments list CO2 as such – nor when this gas is what humans exhale and plants absorb to grow, enabling planetary life to survive and thrive.
Nor can EPA claim that its EF and subsequent efforts to control most of the US economy are not “major” actions and have only minimal economic and political significance.
EPA’s Endangerment Finding and EF-based regulations clearly violate West Virginia v EPA guidelines.
The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo went further. It overturned Chevron v. NRDC and severely limited judicial deference to government agencies. EPA regulators may no longer devise “reasonable interpretations” of unclear statutory language if doing so greatly expands their regulatory authority; significantly increases the cost of complying with a law; or restricts people’s rights to earn a living or choose their automobiles, food, furnaces, and other necessities.
EPA’s Endangerment Finding should also be reversed because the agency put its thumb on the scale when weighing evidence for and against CO2’s role in human and planetary health.
In the Endangerment Finding, the “social cost of carbon” calculations, and the subsequent regulations, the EPA emphasized carbon dioxide’s alleged role in driving an assumed man-made climate crisis – and ignored CO2’s vital role in advancing planetary and human health and welfare.
That violates sound science and the Information Quality Act which requires that agency decisions reflect best available evidence and be based on analyses that are accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased.
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide results in part from warmer oceans releasing CO2 into the atmosphere and in part from emissions from vital human activities that safeguard and prolong life: growing crops and livestock, heating and cooling homes, manufacturing essential products, transporting food and people, responding to emergencies, and more.
Higher CO2 levels benefit plant growth in forests, grasslands, and agricultural fields. They are “greening Planet Earth,” expanding plant coverage in desert areas by enabling plants to grow better with less water.
EPA’s CO2 regulations are curtailing those activities, reducing their enormous benefits, and thus harming human health and welfare.
The Obama EPA also relied on computer models that assume carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the primary factor in moderate planetary temperature increases, extreme weather events, and alleged species extinctions – while ignoring the powerful solar, cosmic, oceanic, and other natural forces that have driven significant climate change throughout history.
Additional problems with the EF and regulations based on it are detailed in CFACT’s amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in Southeastern Legal Foundation v. EPA.
There is no statutory or judicial foundation for deference to EPA’s Endangerment Finding, no legal or scientific basis for it. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin should toss the EF on history’s ash heap.
This article originally appeared at Newsmax
It was de facto an Establishment of Religion.
Zeldin is trying too, Deepstate is fighting tooth&nail to stop him.
“greenhouse gases are air pollutants”
This reasoning only works from a non-scientific – ie a wholly political – angle:
“Yes, carbon dioxide is a pollutant”
Browse the Truth-O-Meter
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/may/12/suburban-virginia-republican-coalition/yes-carbon-dioxide-pollutant/
Why hasn’t the chemical industry updated MSDSs for Carbon dioxide?
6.2 Environmental precautions
No special precautionary measures necessary.
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/GB/en/sds/ALDRICH/295108?userType=undefined
“8.2.3. Environmental exposure controls
None necessary
https://www.msds-al.co.uk/assets/file_assets/SDS-018A_CLP_Carbon_dioxide(124-38-9).pdf
They didn’t get the memo?
“MSDS” (Material Safety Data Sheet) are now increasing being changed to just “SDS” (Safety Data Sheet).
I don’t know why unless it’s because a SDS requires more information organized in a slightly different way?
There’s no discernible difference other than the name.
I’m retired now so it’s it’s been awhile since I’ve had HazMat training.
But I remember when SDS was introduced to replace MSDS.
I found this site which does a pretty good job of laying out the differences.
But you’re right. There’s really no really important differences.
CO2 Has a Very Minor Global Warming Role in the Atmosphere
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/co2-has-a-very-minor-role-in-the-atmosphere
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The IPCC, etc., has dubbed CO2 as having magical global warming power, based on its own “science”
The IPCC, etc., claims, CO2 acts as Climate Control Knob, that eventually will cause runaway Climate Change, if we continue using fossil fuels.
Governments proclaimed, Go Wind and Solar, Go ENERGIEWENDE, go Net zero by 2050, etc., and provided oodles of subsidies, and rules and regulations, and mandates, and prohibitions to make it happen.
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MAGA and burn, baby, burn, may lead to a slightly greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere, which is an absolutely essential gas/ingredient for creating: 1) increased green flora to support abundant fauna all over the world, and 2) increased crop yields to feed 8 billion people. What is not to like?
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The slogan Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to increase command/control by governments, and enable the moneyed elites to get richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people.Natural cycles drive our climate.
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All that W/S money uglified the countryside, killed fisheries, tourism, viewsheds, etc.
But the climate is not any different than 30 years ago, even though, atmosphere CO2 increased from 280 ppm in 1850 to 420 ppm in 2025, 50% in 175 years.
During that time, world surface temps increased by about 1.5 C, only about 0.5 C can be attributed to CO2, with the rest from:
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1) Long-term cycles, such as coming out of the Little Ice Age,
2) Earth surface changes, due to increased agriculture, deforestation, especially in the Tropics, etc.
3) Urban heat islands, such as about 700 miles from north of Portland, Maine, to south of Norfolk, Virginia, forested in 1850, now covered with heat-absorbing human detritus. Japan, China, India, Europe, etc., have similar heat islands
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We need a Pro-life, Pro-CO2 Coalition
Without CO2 there would be no flora and fauna, there would be no life on earth
Net Zero by 2050 is a suicide pact conjured up by climate zealots who are leading the IPCC, and claim they own the science.
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They deny the Little Ice Age, support fraudulent computer temperature projections, and are using the USAID-subsidized Corporate Media to cow/control/brainwash the people, already for 35 years
CO2 is a trace, weak absorber of a small fraction of the available low-energy IR photons.
CO2 has near-zero influence on world surface temperatures
Fossil fuels are good, because they make possible our civilizations, plus they provide extra CO2 to increase crop yields to feed hungry people
‘How could that happen in the land of the free – the home of science, democracy and industry?’
Because it happened in a land where ‘The People’ were mostly amenable to the eviceration of the Constitution by all three branches of a supposedly limited Federal government.
As I’ve written many times here and elsewhere, scrapping the endangerment finding is just a band-aid “fix” to ridding us of attempted climate regulation. So Trump’s guy kills it, and when a Dem president assuredly gets in office again (that’s been our American political system, flipping then flopping and no consistent mandate from the voters that lasts more than one election cycle).
There are only two long term solutions:
How ‘bout a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the regulation of CO2.
I’m on an IPad away from my files, otherwise I’d slap up my rendition of what that might look like, which I’ve slapped up here at WUWT a time or two.
Far easier to pass a law than amend the Constitution.
Which is as it should be.
I live in Ohio. It only takes a simple majority of the voters to amend our state’s constitution.
Once that happens then our state supreme court can’t rule that a law violates our state constitution.
(A recent ballot measure to raise that to 60% failed.)
Assuming you’re being sarcastic.
The Republicans who currently control both houses of Congress this year can and will in fact amend a series of existing Federal laws along the lines of non-leftist/non-woke ideology. They can do that as part of Budget Reconciliation without threat of a Dem filibuster. The vast amounts of Federal money being spent today on the climate religion is easy peasy justification to use Budget Reconcilation to remove climate regulation from the Clean Air Act. That simply makes the endangerment assessment moot, of no authority or consequence.
And SCOTUS has already overturned several major Obama-Biden era radical regulatory rules and has totally rejected the Chevron doctrine that held that administrative agencies are to be given the benefit of the doubt in interpreting any Federal law based upon their known “expertise”. I’m surprised that such a case has not already made it to SCOTUS, but when it does get there – I’m assuming within the next year or so – SCOTUS will strike down EPA regulation of climate which was never ever the intent of Congress with the 1990 Clean Air Amendments law.
How about both?
H U Z Z A !
The WUWT reader audience must be reminded once again that the 2009 Endangerment Finding has been superceded as the formal legal basis for regulating carbon by wording contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 which directly identifies carbon dioxide and several other other carbon compounds as greenhouse gas pollutants and which funds the EPA to regulate emissions of those carbon compounds through 2031.
Science has nothing to do with it. As far as the legalities go, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas pollutant which must be regulated by the EPA for one very simple reason: With the passage of the 2022 IRA, Congress enacted a law which says that it is.
And so reversing the 2009 Endangerment Finding is therefore a mere symbolic act. The basis for the inevitable court challenges to the Trump administration’s policy decision to end regulation of carbon dioxide will be founded in the wording of the 2022 IRA, not in a reversal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding.
No doubt more complex than this.
Yes, it will be more complex. The 2009 Endangerment Finding was issued as part of a Clean Air Act Section 108/112 process, one which was abandoned early on in the second Obama term.
Based on the Congressional authorizations contained in the 2022 IRA legislation, the Biden EPA issued a new anti-carbon regulatory framework based on Section 111 of the Clean Air Act.
The wording of the 2022 IRA is specifically and consciously tailored to give a legal basis for carbon regulation which is independent of any scientific arguments the Trump administration might offer in support of ending carbon regulation.
The climate activists will claim that carbon emissions must be regulated as dangerous pollutants because the Congress said specifically in its own legislation that these ‘pollutants’ were dangerous.
The test of whether or not the Trump administration is serious about ending carbon regulation will be whether or not the new administration abandons the CAA Section 111 framework the Biden EPA put into place after the IRA was passed.
If the new administration does in fact end carbon regulation through an abandonment of the Section 111 framework Biden’s EPA put in place, the climate lawfare activists will then say that Congress has expressed its opinion about the dangers of carbon emissions through specific legislation.
And, therefore, the major questions doctrine does not apply, and also that a rescinding of the 2009 Endangerment Finding has no bearing on the legal issues raised by their lawsuit.
The 2025 budget reconciliation will repeal the IRA so any language in that law will be made moot.
‘The WUWT reader audience must be reminded once again that the 2009 Endangerment Finding has been superceded as the formal legal basis for regulating carbon by wording contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 which directly identifies carbon dioxide and several other other carbon compounds as greenhouse gas pollutants and which funds the EPA to regulate emissions of those carbon compounds through 2031.’
I believe you are aware that Francis Menton (Manhattan Contrarian) disagrees with you in that ‘the IRA was a so-called “reconciliation” bill that was able to clear the Senate with only 51 votes (one of which was a tie-breaker from VP Harris) only because it was not allowed to contain anything but financial and budgetary provisions. Thus an amendment to the Clean Air Act to give EPA explicit new authority to regulate the six GHGs would clearly have been non-germane and not allowed into the statute.’
In other words, while there will be hurdles to rescind the the Endangerment Finding, the IRA isn’t one of them.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-1-26-how-to-rescind-the-endangerment-finding-in-a-way-that-will-stick
Frank from NoVA: “In other words, while there will be hurdles to rescind the the Endangerment Finding, the IRA isn’t one of them.”
Frank from NoVA, what Francis Menton does not understand — or refuses to acknowledge — is that the 2009 Endangerment Finding was not, and is not, the currently operative legal basis for carbon regulation under the Clean Air Act as implemented by the Biden administration’s EPA.
It no longer matters whether the 2009 Endangerment Finding is either on the EPA’s regulatory books, or it isn’t.
The fact is that the 2022 IRA is on the books as an act passed by Congress. The IRA expresses the sense of Congress that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It directly labels carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It supplies funding to the EPA to regulate certain specifically identified carbon compounds as pollutants.
A CAA Section 111 approach is how the EPA chose to regulate carbon emissions under explicit direction from the Congress to regulate carbon emissions, direction as was enacted under provisions of the IRA. The CAA Section 111 approach does not require an Endangerment Finding for carbon regulation to proceed.
Which is why the authors of the 2022 IRA chose the strategy that they did. Using their legislative strategy, they consciously decoupled the science of AGW from the carbon emissions regulation question and made it a matter of Congressional intent that certain specifically identified carbon emissions, as explicitly identified in the IRA, should be regulated as pollutants.
The fact that the 2022 IRA was passed with a slim majority has no bearing on the issue. There is no valid argument to be made that the 2022 IRA does not in fact express the intent of a majority in Congress in the year 2022 that carbon emissions should be regulated.
Repeating what I said above, the true test of whether or not the Trump administration is serious about ending carbon regulation will be whether or not the new administration abandons the CAA Section 111 framework the Biden EPA put into place after the IRA was passed.
If the new administration does in fact end carbon regulation through an abandonment of the Section 111 framework Biden’s EPA put into place, the climate lawfare activists will then say that Congress has expressed its opinion about the dangers of carbon emissions through specific legislation, the 2022 IRA.
And, therefore, the major questions doctrine does not apply, and also that a rescinding of the 2009 Endangerment Finding has no bearing on the legal issues raised by their lawsuit.
‘The fact is that the 2022 IRA is on the books as an act passed by Congress. The IRA expresses the sense of Congress that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It directly labels carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It supplies funding to the EPA to regulate certain specifically identified carbon compounds as pollutants.’
None of which changes the fact that it was a reconciliation bill pursuant to the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, and therefore exempt from the Senate’s normal requirement for a bill to attain cloture. Under such a bill, non-budget items, e.g., expressing ‘the sense of Congress that carbon dioxide is a pollutant’, is considered to be extraneous.
Frank, the authors of the 2022 IRA are environmental lawfare specialists with a demonstrated track record of getting what they want from their allies in the Congress, in the EPA, and in the courts.
They have said in no uncertain terms that their intent in crafting the IRA was to make it unambiguously clear that Congress was giving the EPA explicit direction and the necessary funding to regulate the six carbon ‘pollutants’ listed in the law.
These environmental lawfare specialists have also said that the law has done exactly what they intended it to do when they wrote it — which is to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions using the funding the Congress provided.
Duane has pointed out that the 2022 IRA is subject to repeal, something which he expects to see happen by August.
If this is what we should expect to see happening, then the next question becomes, what will the Trump administration be doing in the meantime with the CAA Section 111 carbon regulation framework it inherited from the Biden administration?
Simply close it down forthwith and see what happens next? Wait until after August to see how the Congress actually deals with the issue before taking some kind of substantive action?
You are unfortunately too correct that environmental law fare specialists have ‘a demonstrated track record of getting what they want from their allies in the Congress, in the EPA, and in the courts’.
I see the same process / tactic on ‘immigration’ – apparently no one had any legal ability to oppose the unvetted admittance of millions of persons during the Biden administration, but now, under Trump, every single deportee must be given full access to our judicial system.
If the executive, legislative and judicial branches have effectively become ‘ratchets’ that work only to satisfy the political desires of the Left, we’re going to collapse sooner rather than later.
Again and again, the well underway process of the 2025 budget reconciliation will repeal all or most of the IRA, especially including language declaring carbon a dangerous threat. Going into law a little later this year, before the August recess.
Duane, please see my response to Frank above.
Budget reconciliation will repeal all of most of the IRA, especially that part. Before the August recess.
You and Beta Blocker may be correct that ‘policies’, as opposed to just revenues and expenditures, can be brought into law through the reconciliation process. If true, I’d argue that the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 is probably the most destructive piece of legislation in US history.
I believe that the House already passed the budget reconciliation bill. Did it, infact, repeal the IRA, or at least the offensive parts?
The IRA will be terminated by the Republican budget reconciliation act so that excuse is going away this year. The rejection of the IRA is in fact the centerpiece of budget reconciliation which will pass both houses of Congress and be signed into law by Trump a little later this year.
Along with that I expect budget reconciliation to explicitly exempt “climate regulation” from EPA’s authority.
Very nice Craig, clear and to the point. Nothing the government says should be set in stone. The government is no different than any other group, it has prejudices, favorites, contempt and all the other failings of humans. The difference is government is powerful and many times thoughtless. Therefore nothing the government says or does should be above being challenged. Not in the courts, we have all witnessed things like judge shopping and so on. I see something like a Senate or House hearing but not run by the Senate or House. In the case of CAGW we show up with our best and the government shows up with its best. If we present the more compelling case we win and the government policy is vacated. If the government has a better case they win and the policy stays in place. The point is it can be challenged anytime, just because one side came out on top one time does not settle the matter. It only settles it until it can be proven wrong. Is this going to slow down legislation and rule making? You bet it is and I don’t see that as a bad thing.
The endangerment finding completely discredited the EPA as a science based institution. The took the worst case scenarios from models which have been invalidated by empirical observations and then imputed fictional costs to an unknowable future. It needs to be exposed for the fraud it is.