For years, Washington politicians told the American people there was a carbon dioxide (CO2) “problem” so serious it justified rewriting our entire energy economy. They claimed CO2 was dangerous, labeled it an “endangerment,” and used that finding as a blank check for regulation, mandates, and subsidies.
Many of us warned that this wasn’t science… it was politics. Now, even the Environmental Protection Agency is backing away from that claim.
By repealing the so-called endangerment finding, the EPA has admitted what working Americans have known all along: CO2 was never the existential threat it was sold to be. This single regulatory reversal wipes out more than a trillion dollars in compliance costs and saves families thousands of dollars per vehicle.
But before taxpayers breathe a sigh of relief, we need to talk about the billions already wasted, and the billions more Washington still wants to spend.
CO2 makes up about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is essential for photosynthesis and life itself. Plants depend on it. Crops require it. Throughout Earth’s history, life flourished when CO2 levels were far higher than today.
Yet politicians treated this trace, life-supporting gas as if it were toxic waste. And once you convince people there’s a “crisis,” the spending never stops.
Now comes the most dangerous and dishonest phase of the carbon agenda.
After telling Americans that CO2 is a menace, the same policymakers are asking taxpayers to fund massive carbon capture and underground sequestration projects, projects that would take a harmless, widely dispersed gas and turn it into a concentrated substance capable of killing people if it escapes.
Think about that. For decades, regulators told us their mission was to clean up environmental hazards, reduce risk, and protect public health. Now they want to create a new health and safety threat on purpose, inject it underground, and hope nothing goes wrong, all while sending the bill to taxpayers.
This is where the conversation always gets uncomfortable, because it exposes the truth.
Every time you hear a multi-billion-dollar energy company brag about how they are “lowering carbon” or “cleaning up emissions,” ask two simple questions: Why? And who’s paying?
Now we know the answers. There is no real carbon emergency. And you’re paying for it anyway.
If carbon capture and sequestration were truly safe, proven, and economically viable, it wouldn’t need massive government subsidies. It wouldn’t rely on tax credits, grants, and federal guarantees. Companies would fund it themselves, just like every other productive investment in a free market.
Instead, taxpayers are being forced to bankroll projects that compress CO2 into dangerous concentrations, transport it across communities, and inject it underground near farms, water supplies, and homes. Regulators admit monitoring systems are incomplete. Long-term liability is unclear. And once the CO2 is injected, the public, not the corporation, will be left holding the risk.
That isn’t environmental protection. That’s regulatory insanity.
We talk a lot these days about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. We talk about “DOGE-ing” government, doing away with bloated programs that don’t solve real problems. Carbon capture subsidies should be at the top of that list.
This is corporate welfare disguised as climate policy.
It is billions of taxpayer dollars spent to “solve” a problem politicians overstated, using technology that isn’t proven at scale, while creating new safety risks that didn’t previously exist. And it all happens while families struggle with higher energy bills, inflation, and an electric grid that is less reliable than it was a decade ago.
Meanwhile, the global picture hasn’t changed. The United States is told to cut emissions, while countries like China continue building coal plants at a staggering pace. Emissions aren’t reduced, they’re exported, along with jobs and energy security.
The EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding is a step back toward honesty. It acknowledges that CO2 is not the villain it was made out to be.
Now policymakers need the courage to finish the job. That means ending the fear-based carbon narrative, stopping taxpayer handouts to politically favored corporations, and refusing to create new environmental and health risks in the name of virtue signaling.
Americans don’t need another green scheme. They need affordable, reliable energy, and a government that stops charging them to fix problems that never existed.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
I know that it’s far too soon to say that we’ve won the climate wars. We wouldn’t be where we are but for the election of President Trump in 2016 and 2024. Still, these can be seen as strategic victories. The warmunists are at their “Baghdad Bob” moment, when Muhammad al-Sahhaf declared that there were no American forces in Baghdad, with the split-screen showing Abrams tanks rolling through the city. They’ll be in denial long before they reach acceptance. But still, this time really feels different…
It is not the end of the climate war, nor the beginning of the end; but perhaps the end of the beginning! My apologies to Churchill, but England isn’t yet saved, not by a long chalk.
Perhaps once Mad Milliband is thrown down, and the idiocy of Unreliable Energy becomes obvious to even the highly educated; we can liberate the cradle of democracy from the EU Fascistas!
“and the idiocy of Unreliable Energy becomes obvious to even the highly educated;”
That made me laugh! So true! The highly educated will eventually be educated.
abandon their religion- not likely
Remember, there is no such thing as a “climate fight”
People who think they can control the climate must first control the weather.
Its been tried before by banging drums, dancing, tossing virgins into volcanoes and burning witches at the stake.
Nothing has ever worked to control weather and nothing ever will work. It’s a sham and a scam of the first order.
If only more folks could get the message that CO2 is still scarce in our atmosphere. If it weren’t then greenhouse operations would not need to buy it in order to keep concentrations at optimal levels for profitable business. Water in all its varying states totally dwarfs the effects of all the dry gasses on daily weather, and therefore climate over the course of time.
Attributing weather to CO2 levels is in reality all wet.
We need more CO2 ppm to increase flora and fauna, decrease desert areas and increase crop yields per acre to better feed 8 billion people.
Any money spend on measures to reduce CO2 ppm is suicide.
The Obama EPA measures, now debunked, were a malicious/evil crusade to increase Democrat command/control over sovereign people.
That is the reason they have meltdowns/protest so much. It undermines/removes one of their corruption pillars
That is also the reason they unanimously have meltdowns/object so much to photo IDs before voting, and proof of citizenship before voting in federal elections. That also undermines/removes one of their corruption pillars.
There is no reason to take CO2 out of the atmosphere governments, academics, scientists and journalists have been lying to us decades. No more pissing our time, money and resources away on lies. This has to end.
The irony is that, if humanity survives its current self-induced psychosis, some time in the not-too-distant geologic future, we will have to develop an infrastructure for adding vast quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere! The essential gas for all plants, and hence ALL Life, will continue to drop lower as the base of the oceanic food chain uses calcium carbonate to make armor and future countertops.
Considering what we have been witnessing the last few decades, I have grave concerns about the odds of Mankind, and all other Life, surviving! But perhaps an intelligent species will yet evolve!
This will not end until the lights go out, over and over, and people ask, “Why do the lights go out over and over? They never used to”
Laws need to be passed. EOs are easily reversed.
Just Stop Net Zero – Carbon Dioxide is innocent
https://www.juststopnetzero.com/
Unfortunately in the UK our government is still full speed ahead for bankruptcy.- and now wants solar farms in space.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/02/14/mad-miliband-plots-solar-farms-in-space/
The EPA, now 55 years old, accomplished its original mandate of cleaning up the air, water, and soil, but then went on to become like a fourth branch of the government, and a dangerous one. Perhaps, in order to protect the Constitution, the EPA should be abolished. There is a point where “protecting the environment” becomes an end unto itself and where the ends justify the means, with the ultimate goal becoming grabbing more and more power. That point has been reached.
Every organization over time redirects their original goal to that of self-preservation and thus becomes a burden on society.
Extinction is the norm in Nature.
That would mean that government and bureaucracy are not normal or natural.
Correct and that’s why they perish after having concluded a journey which is well known and has been recognized often in the past.
Or downgrade it to below cabinet status and greatly reduce its size.
And the Lord said unto Gideon, “The people that are with ye are yet too many…”
EPA is a hammer in search of a nail. Once major air pollutants like SO2 and NOx were addressed, EPA under democrat administrations looked for emissions with diminishingly smaller environmental impacts. Thus, CO2.
But but there is concensus between almost 1% of all scientists.
Wayne is great- glad we have him – and to make the claim even more absurd of the total 4 one hundredth s of one percent of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is tiny, the vast majority, something like 95% is naturally occurring and we can’t get rid of that so what could be removed if all use of fossil fuels was stored is utterly irrelevant and certainly has no impact on the climate
“Now, even the Environmental Protection Agency is backing away from that claim.”
This sentence makes it sound like those who originally enacted the EF have come to their senses. Could not be further from the truth.
Indeed. More accurate to say “Even the EPA can be flushed like a toilet.”
It’s harder to flush the turds from other toilets that still stink up the EPA, or any agency.
Gaia, with her 10% or more of global “greening” (that is, increase in vegetative leaf area) over the last 20 or so years—directed attributed mostly to increasing atmospheric CO2 levels* and secondarily to a slight increase in global warmth with associated resulting higher absolute humidity levels—thanks humans very much for their assistance!
*This, from Google’s AI bot (with my bold emphasis added):
“Global greening has increased the Earth’s green leaf area by approximately 5% over the last two decades, representing an area equivalent to the Amazon rainforest. This trend continued through 2020, with 55% of global vegetated areas showing signs of greening . . .
Key Findings on Recent Global Greening:
Extent: NASA satellite data shows a 10% increase in green foliage cover from 2000 to 2020, with some studies indicating 25% to 50% of vegetated land has greened over the past 35 years.
Key Drivers: Roughly 70% of this greening is attributed to carbon dioxide fertilization, as higher CO2 levels boost plant photosynthesis. Nitrogen deposits contribute another 9% . . .
Record Highs: The year 2020 was noted as the greenest in modern satellite records (2001-2020).
Dryland Greening: Surprisingly, arid regions like the Sahel in Africa and the Sahara desert are greening, with the Sahara shrinking by 8% over three decades.”
The above needs to be updated to reflect global leaf area measurements performed over the last five years, where the situation is even better!
From the above article:
“Yet politicians treated this trace, life-supporting gas as if it were toxic waste.”
Well, it wasn’t just the politicians. “Scientists” being employed by the EPA also went along with the EPA-manufactured meme that CO2 was a “toxic gas” despite the facts that:
1) it is absolutely necessary for plant photosynthesis, which is the basis for all life on planet Earth,
and
2) in normal breathing, a healthy human typically exhales CO2 at a concentration of approximately 4% to 5% (or 40,000 to 50,000 ppm) . . . which is about 100 times the near- surface atmospheric CO2 level of about 430 ppm.
In simple terms, it hard to find an example of organization displaying greater ignorance of science than that of the EPA in issuing its “endangerment finding”.
Vehicle prices haven’t gone down yet. When do you expect that will happen? Care to make any testable predictions?
Even if the liberals vastly overstated the risks of climate change, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they pushed up costs as much as is claimed here, nor that repealing the endangerment finding will necessarily lower costs by that amount.
Both sides are tempted to exaggerate. And personally I don’t trust anything that Trump says. My doubts about climate change are completely independent of him.
It is not a light sswitch.
Carbon dioxide is irrelevant, when it comes to Earth’s temperature. Check this:
https://notrickszone.com/2024/01/18/nearly-160-scientific-papers-detail-the-minuscule-effect-co2-has-on-earths-temperature/
The other thing the corrupt media is not talking about, is that 420 ppm of CO2 is dangerously close to the 200 ppm level, at which the life starts to die. Should the CO2 concentration drop further to 150 ppm, game over! This is why I keep saying, that CO2 removal from atmosphere should be made a criminal offense. The CO2 concentration in this graph showing CO2 and temperature reconstruction over last 600 million years:
https://geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
Scroll down until you see the graph titled “Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time”. The CO2 was declining (with an exemption between roughly 150 to 300 million years ago) from some 7000 ppm to today’s measly 420 ppm. The life survived, despite the climate expert Greta warning of 6th extinction. As Dr Patric Moore, the co founder of Green Peace once sad: if this decline will continue, countries may well be given quotas in the future, how much limestone they must crush to release CO2, in order to save life on Earth. So, congratulation to president Trump and his administration! Well done.
Strategic victory? More like a tactical victory. Far from over. States can and will act. California, joined by a coalition of over 20 states representing more than 50% of the U.S. population, continues to enforce its own vehicle emission standards. States like New York, Pennsylvania, and Montana have “Green Amendments” in their constitutions that grant citizens a right to a clean environment. These are being used to sue for climate action at the state level, where federal deregulation holds no sway. Groups like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) continue to operate cap-and-trade programs for power plants, effectively maintaining a carbon price in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regardless of the EPA’s stance. Repealing the EF may have opened a legal “Pandora’s Box.” Previously, federal law often preempted (blocked) state-level lawsuits against oil companies because the EPA was already “handling” the issue via the EF. Within a year, the “chaos” of a fragmented regulatory landscape may prove just as pervasive as the federal mandates, maybe worse.
Each journey begins with a first step.
The first step does not guarantee the road will be smooth and level.
Popcorn and beer at ready.
Great article!
CO2 is finally exonerated!
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/110244/
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/110244/#117934
Britain welcomes polar bears (the last refuge).
Actually, geohistorically, we are extremely low on atmospheric CO2, which has been in near straightline decline since life first immerged from the oceans about 500 million years ago. The explanation is very simple: As life cycles, some of the CO2 in the form of biological material gets taken out of the life cycle by being buried through geological processes (i.e. it gets buried in mud), and eventually becomes fossil fuels. More sinisterly, other CO2 is turned to stone by clams, coral, etc., and this can never to returned to the atmosphere. So someday, millions of years from now, all life will cease to exist, because the atmopheric CO2 will be too low. But as stewards of the planet, we are obliged to burn as much fossil fuels as possible to replentish the atomospheric CO2, and thus extend life on Earth as far into the future as possible.
Is there a site on the planet that is so supremely geologically stable that we can do something this stupid and not see the failure in a decade +/-?
We went through nonsense with burning spend nuclear fuel rods when it became unfashionable to recycle those.
He who ignores, alters, and/or fails to learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them.
not burning, burying…. typo