Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, defending the Trump administration's proposal to revoke the "endangerment finding" that underpins regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, said Sunday that many of the warnings from the past didn't lead to disaster.
"To reach the 2009 endangerment finding, they relied on the most pessimistic views of the science," Zeldin said on CNN's "State of the Union."
"The great news is that a lot of the pessimistic views of the science in 2009 that were being assumed ended up not panning out. We can rely on 2025 facts as opposed to 2009 bad assumptions.”
The EPA has used a 2009 scientific finding that so-called climate change is a danger to heatlh and safety to back many regulations that aimed to decrease pollution and protect the environment.
If the repeal succeeds, that could strip the EPA's methods.
The administration, in its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, said greenhouse gas emissions have continued climbing in the earth's atmosphere, "driven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources" without "producing the degree of adverse impacts to public health and welfare in the United States that the EPA anticipated in the 2009 Endangerment Finding."
Meanwhile, Zeldin said, the climate "has always been changing."
"We should not be relying on all these foreign sources of energy," he said. "We should be unleashing energy dominance here in this country. We do it better for our environment than so many other countries do for theirs, and for the rest of the world. It's better for our economy, our national security, and our environment."
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, in comments to CNN, said the "scientific certainty" about climate change and its dangers has "grown stronger since 2009."
"There is no evidence that has emerged or been published in the scientific literature in the past 16 years that would in any way challenge the scientific basis of the 2009 endangerment finding," he said.
But Zeldin, when pressed Sunday on whether he's skeptical about greenhouse gases being the driver of man-made climate change, responded, "That might be your way to try to twist my words."
“We’re going through a public comment period," he said. "We want to make the right decision afterwards. But for people who want to sum up the 2009 endangerment finding as if they study carbon dioxide as an endangerment on human health, they did not do that."
And when asked if the EPA should have a role in trying to fight changes in the weather, Zeldin responded that the Supreme Court has "made it very clear that I have to follow the law."
That means, Zeldin added, that he can't be "creative" but must follow the law.
"So when you read through the 2009 endangerment finding, they say that where there’s silence in the law, there are gaps that I should just be interpreting that as my own discretion," he said. "The Supreme Court has made it very clear that that is not what is a power that I have."
He added that on the 100th day of Trump's term in office, the EPA released 100 environmental accomplishments that took place, including the wildfire cleanup in Los Angeles and increasing water quality standards in southeast Pennsylvania and into Delaware.
"Just last week, I was in Mexico City announcing an international agreement with Mexico to advance a permanent 100% solution to resolve the Tijuana River raw sewage crisis that's been plaguing millions of Southern California residents for decades," he said. "That is a pace that motivates us to keep up."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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