The nation's climate denier-in-chief, President Donald Trump, has wasted no time throwing monkey wrenches into federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That includes scrubbing websites.
The Environmental Data and Government Initiative reports the feds have already deleted climate change language from more than 200 websites, including the Environmental Protection Agency. But buried deep in the EPA web pages, unreachable from the home page, is EPA's Climate Change Impacts page.
The EPA's website update from March 3 warns us that:
“Climate change also affects people’s health in many ways. As the climate changes, more people may be exposed to extreme weather like heat, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires. These events can cause illness, injury, and even death.”
The page makes the case that climate change is a threat to water, food and air quality as well as mental health and well being.
No doubt the EPA would love to take down those climate change website warnings ASAP.
To that end, last month the EPA announced 31 specific regulatory rollbacks that will impact permitting and day-to-day operations at thousands of industrial facilities.
Newly minted EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a Wall Street Journal essay, “We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”
Tucked among the 31 actions and recommendations is “reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and regulations and actions that rely on that finding.”
This is the white whale for climate change deniers. The Endangerment Finding comes from Massachusetts v. EPA, a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act.
Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens ruled:
“Under the clear terms of the Clean Air Act, EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do. To the extent that this constrains agency discretion to pursue other priorities of the Administrator or the President, this is the congressional design. EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command. Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate.”
As a result of Massachusetts v. EPA, the feds established its Endangerment Finding that six specific greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
The finding has been a thorn in the side of the fossil fuel industry since. It is the bedrock foundation for laws and regulations that cut greenhouse gas emissions on vehicles and power plants.
And it is standing squarely in the way of Trump’s “drill baby drill” mindset. But it will be a tall order to unring the EPA's Endangerment Finding bell.
EPA will need to put pen to paper and make the case that greenhouse gases don't contribute to climate change and write rules, including justifications, for public comment in the Federal Register, then ultimately issue a final rule. Specifically EPA will need to justify that:
- climate change ain't happening due to the burning of fossil fuels, and
- even if it is, it doesn't hurt anything, we pinky swear!
Easy peasy lemon squeezy? Not so much. One wonders who will do the work. The POTUS plans to gut EPA's scientific research arm, which likely would be tasked with creating the fiction that carbon pollution has nothing to do with the warming of Earth.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zeldin enlists some eager and willing participants among Big Oil and GOP congressional climate deniers to spearhead the effort. Good luck with that.
I seriously doubt the EPA will succeed. But don't take my word for it. Upon seeing the pablum being spewed by Zeldin, one of the lawyers who spearheaded Massachusetts v. EPA, David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at Environmental Integrity Project, declared, “I could go into the D.C. Circuit and argue against this in pig latin and win it.”
Meanwhile, the effects of greenhouse gas on climate change are felt worldwide. Rising temperatures. Deadlier hurricanes, floods and wildfires. Droughts. The latest United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying. Late last month, the publication Science reported a growing global water shortage on land, which has huge implications for agriculture.
We are living in the midst of climate change. The public sees it. The public knows it. And Trump's EPA fiddles while the world burns. The Washington, D.C. Circuit Court, if given the opportunity, will say the same.
