Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s move to repeal the so-called endangerment finding that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health.
“To reach the 2009 endangerment finding, they relied on the most pessimistic views of the science. The great news is that a lot of the pessimistic views of the science in 2009 that was being assumed ended up not panning out,” Zeldin mentioned on NCS’s “State of the Union.” “We can rely on 2025 facts as opposed to 2009 bad assumptions.”
The 2009 scientific finding that human-caused local weather change endangers human health and security, which has served as EPA’s foundation for a lot of of its vital laws aiming to defend the atmosphere and reduce local weather pollution. If profitable, the repeal might strip away the federal authorities’s most powerful way to management the nation’s planet-warming pollution and battle local weather change.
The textual content of the administration’s proposal to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding mentioned that whereas greenhouse fuel emissions have continued to rise within the ambiance, that rise has been “driven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources,” and has occurred “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.”
The US is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and historically has emitted extra planet-warming pollution than some other nation. Many rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have confirmed each local weather pollution and its warming results are not just harming public health but killing people outright.
In the practically 16 years because the EPA first issued the Supreme Court-ordered endangerment finding, the world has warmed an extra 0.45 levels Celsius (or 0.81 levels Fahrenheit) to 1.4 levels Celsius, in accordance to local weather scientist Zeke Hausfather.
“Both the scientific certainty around climate change and evidence of the dangers it is causing have grown stronger since 2009,” Hausfather mentioned in an e mail. “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.”
Pressed on whether or not he’s skeptical of the scientific consensus that greenhouse fuel emissions are the overwhelming driver of synthetic local weather change, Zeldin mentioned, “That might be your way to try to twist my words.”
The EPA is in a public remark interval on its proposal to repeal all greenhouse fuel emissions laws for motor autos, since they stem from the 2009 finding.
“We’re going through a public comment period. 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,” Zeldin instructed NCS.
Asked whether or not the EPA ought to have a task in attempting to fight local weather change, Zeldin mentioned that the Supreme Court “made it very clear that I have to follow the law.”
“I have to follow the plain language of the law, and I can’t get creative. So when you read through the 2009 endangerment finding, they say that where there’s silence in the law, there’s gaps that I should just be interpreting that as my own discretion. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that that is not what is a power that I have,” he mentioned, including that drawing up such a regulation ought to be left to Congress.
NCS’s Ella Nilsen and Andrew Freedman contributed to this report.