Freeman: Assault on climate policy
President Donald Trump has been trying to eliminate climate regulations since his first day back in office, when he signed an executive order declaring the primacy of fossil fuels.
But his administration’s most radical step came last month, when the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal that would rescind its 2009 “endangerment finding” — the scientific conclusion that greenhouse gases contribute to global warming and harm human health and well-being.
This isn’t just another regulatory rollback. It’s an assault on the foundation of all federal climate policy.
The endangerment finding originally applied to vehicle emissions, but it also underpins every major federal climate rule in America: car and truck emissions standards, power plant regulations and limits on oil and gas facilities. By removing this cornerstone, Trump’s EPA is repudiating federal authority to limit greenhouse gases, our most powerful tool for fighting climate change.
The irony is that no industry asked for this step. Car makers need stable rules to compete globally. Power companies have invested billions in renewable energy, which regulatory uncertainty puts at risk. Even most oil and gas companies support a national approach to limiting methane. Companies may stay quiet to avoid crossing a vengeful administration, but they know climate change is real and that some federal regulation makes business sense.
As the federal government retreats, states such as California will try to fill the void. But Trump is trying to block them too, directing the Justice Department to challenge state climate policies.
The foundation the administration is attacking seemed unshakable. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate pollutants that endanger human health. In 2007, in Massachusetts vs. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants, and that the endangerment decision must be based on science.
Two years later, after the EPA reviewed studies by the National Climate Assessment, the National Research Council and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it found that greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere are a danger, pointing to higher temperatures, worse air quality, extreme weather, spreading drought and more food- and water-borne pathogens. Following the process set out in the Clean Air Act, the agency then established national emission standards for the sources in each sector of the U.S. economy that contribute to this problem.
To unravel all of this, the Trump administration proposal offers a medley of strained legal and scientific arguments.
First, it claims that greenhouse gases are not pollutants because they have global, not local, effects. This argument is hard to square with the Supreme Court’s ruling, but they are trying it anyway. The proposal also asserts that U.S. emissions don’t contribute to harms from climate change because climate impacts are too remote and American emissions are too small a share of the global total to matter.
The proposal also folds policy objections into the scientific assessment, asserting that regulating greenhouse gases simply costs too much and accomplishes too little. But this muddles the issues. Whether climate change is harmful is a purely scientific assessment. How stringently to regulate is a separate question that must weigh both costs and benefits.
In all, the proposal’s scattershot justifications seem designed to offer the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court — where the issue will likely land — a variety of ways to agree.
As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin put it in announcing the proposal, the administration is “driving a dagger through the heart of climate change religion.” But climate change isn’t a religion — it’s physics and chemistry. And science doesn’t care about politics. We can’t solve climate change with regulation alone. But we certainly can’t solve it by pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
The administration’s assault on climate action won’t change the evidence or reality of climate change. As scientists have predicted, storms are growing more intense, heat waves more deadly, wildfires more destructive. We spend billions annually on disaster response while other countries surge ahead in clean-energy innovation and manufacturing. China now dominates solar panel and electric vehicle production; Europe leads in offshore wind.
The question isn’t whether we’ll eventually return to responsible climate policy — we will because we must. The question is how much time we’ll lose, and how much damage we’ll suffer, while politics masquerades as good policy.
Jody Freeman is a professor and director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University. She was counselor for energy and climate change during the Obama administration and wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.