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Endangerment Finding Rescission Major Win for Science and the Rule of Law

SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images

Jack Spencer is a senior research fellow for Energy and Environmental Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

The Trump administration’s decision to rescind the endangerment finding regarding carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles is a huge win for all Americans … and the environment.

To recap, the Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that so-called “greenhouse gases” were pollutants and could be regulated under the Clean Air Act–if they contribute to dangerous air pollution. Then the Obama’s EPA took that opportunity in 2009 to declare that these gases threaten the public health and welfare and emissions from motor vehicles contribute to that alleged problem.

As stated on the EPA website, the 2009 findings did not themselves create any environmental regulation, but were a “prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and other sectors.” Obama and Biden took full advantage of that prerequisite.

The Clean Power Plan, the Electric Vehicle Mandate, and a train wreck of other greenhouse gas regulations were a direct result of the Endangerment Finding. That is because even though the Endangerment Finding spoke on tailpipe emissions from vehicles, the Obama and Biden administrations claimed that it required them to regulate greenhouse gas emissions anywhere and everywhere.

Regulating everything everywhere all at once was, in fact, the true purpose of the Endangerment Finding.

The problem is that the entire argument to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act was built on a melting ice sculpture.

Though the detailed legal argument is worth diving into, suffice it to say the act was never meant to regulate greenhouse gasses and such regulation was certainly not expressly authorized by Congress.

Gases like CO2 are naturally occurring and everywhere.

Nearly every activity and everybody emits carbon dioxide.

Thus, the endangerment finding essentially opened the floodgates for broader regulation of CO2 and that essentially gave a handful of bureaucrats in Washington the authority to regulate our entire lives.

It also helped to provide the justification for the Biden administration to integrate climate change considerations into regulatory actions such as those related to the National Environmental Policy Act and from agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy. That is why CO2 regulations never stopped at cars or power production but included efforts to control everything from ice cream trucks, to backyard grills, to home furnaces.

Repealing the endangerment finding though is not just about legal overreach. Regulating CO2 never made sense at any level.

Despite the lectures, the virtue signaling, and promises of impending climate doom, global warming extremists never had much of a leg to stand on and anyone paying attention could see that.

They threw every propaganda technique at the wall and somehow got many to stick.

First, they created fear.

We were told that the science was settled … we were always just a few years away from the tipping point from which there would be no return. We were told that every fire, every tornado, every sex-changing lizard (yes) was caused by global warming.

Then they went after the kids. Schools began teaching global warming at almost every grade level.

Science is not something that is ever “settled” but is rather an approach of observation and testing that helps us to better understand our reality. Our understanding of climate and what causes it to change over time has never been as well understood as we were told.

Perhaps that biggest deception of all is that even if one accepts the science as purported by climate alarmists, the regulatory authority of EPA, and the fear mongering, there is no amount of CO2 reduction that the United States could do that would have any meaningful impact on climate.

According to the climate sensitivity models used by the same agencies that want to regulate CO2, not even the most draconian carbon dioxide reduction schemes would make a bit of environmental difference.

None of this means that we should do nothing. Environmental issues are important and should be taken seriously but they should not be hijacked to advance ulterior agendas, which was clearly the case with global warming policy.

President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin should be applauded for actually following the science and respecting the rule of law–things that have been too often ignored when it comes to climate.

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Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE

Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.

The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.

In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.

You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.

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