Hurrah!
Decades of sham climate-premised green scams promoting mandates and subsidies for costly, anemic wind and solar fantasies at the expense of abundant fossil energy we can afford and depend on appear finally to be over.
On March 12, incoming EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency will undertake 31 historic deregulatory actions to fulfill “President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.”
Zeldin pledged, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
As Zeldin elaborated: “The Trump administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”
He added, “We will follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads, and we will do so while advancing our commitment towards helping to deliver cleaner, healthier, and safer air, land, and water.”
Centrally important to all of this is an intent to reign in EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a “climate pollutant” under a 2009 Endangerment Finding in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Departments of Energy, Transportation, Interior, and other agencies.
President Trump made this a key priority on his first-day executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” where he gave the EPA administrator a 30-day deadline to submit recommendations on the legality of the Endangerment Finding and its continuation.
When EPA made the Endangerment Finding, the agency did not consider future costs that would flow from it. Since then, justifications based upon it have run up an aggregate cost of over $1 trillion for seven vehicle regulations alone.
EPA will now reconsider all of its prior regulations and actions that rely on the Endangerment Finding.
The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks.
Although under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act Congress tasked EPA to regulate new motor vehicles when the administrator determines that emissions of an air pollutant endanger public health and welfare, there was no evidence that CO2 presented any such risk.
Nevertheless, the agency went even far beyond that, arguing in multiple creative leaps of conjecture that a combined mixture of six gases contributes some mysterious amount above zero to climate change, and therefore that climate change creates some mysterious amount of endangerment above zero to public health.
In other words, CO2 pollutes the climate, causing danger to motorists, but somehow global warming influences that reduce icy roads don’t count?
How unfair!
Nevertheless, the Obama-Biden administration got the preferred Clean Air Act conclusion that it wanted in order to push electric vehicles.
White House OMB Director Russ Vought commented, “EPA’s regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy — jobs, wages, and family budgets. It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama Endangerment Finding.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said: “The 2009 Endangerment Finding has had an enormously negative impact on the lives of the American people. For more than 15 years, the U.S. government used the finding to pursue an onslaught of costly regulations — raising prices and reducing reliability and choice on everything from vehicles to electricity and more. It’s past time the United States ensures the basis for issuing environmental regulations follows the science and betters human lives.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy commented: “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and the hard work of Administrator Zeldin, we are taking another important step toward ushering in a golden age of transportation. The American people voted for a government that prioritizes affordable, safe travel and lets them choose the vehicles they drive. Today we are delivering on that promise, and this will allow the DOT to accelerate its work on new vehicle fuel economy standards that will lower car prices and no longer force Americans to purchase electric vehicles they don’t want.”
Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum observed: “The United States produces energy smarter, cleaner, and safer than anywhere else in the world.” He said, “To achieve President Trump’s vision for energy dominance, we are prioritizing innovation over regulation to attain an affordable, reliable, clean, and secure energy future for all Americans.”
These EPA regulatory rollbacks will end trillions of inflationary expenses and hidden “taxes” for American citizens, households and businesses, reducing costs of home heating, gasoline, car purchases, and countless other expenses.
EPA regulatory reforms under consideration will benefit industry and job growth as well.
Included, are rulings that are associated with: regulations on power plants; the oil and gas industry; Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants; and the mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program that imposed significant costs on the American energy supply.
The EPA can also be counted on to end the Biden-Harris administration’s “Social Cost of Carbon” climate propaganda program and de facto electric vehicle mandates including heavy-duty trucks.
Whereas the Endangerment Finding acknowledges and identifies significant uncertainties in science and assumptions used to justify its rulings, the biggest endangerment of all has resulted from EPA’s regulatory overreach to strangle America’s energy energy-fueled economy.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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