It was only last week that an employee at the Environmental Protection Agency told me that “morale is at an all-time low,” as administrator Lee Zeldin continued attempts to retaliate against public dissenters and the Office of Research and Development found itself on the chopping block. One can only imagine what it’s like there today, after multiple outlets reported that Zeldin is just about ready to literally roll back almost two decades of US efforts to confront climate change.
First reported by the New York Times and the confirmed by the Washington Post, the EPA will soon release a plan to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis for essentially all federal attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. That finding, almost preposterously true, states that carbon dioxide and other warming gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” This is not up for debate. It is not open to varying scientific interpretations. It is not ideologically driven. It is an obvious, brutally clear fact.
And yet. Though the language of the new repeal of that finding is not yet available, EPA’s reported idea here is absurd. The finding, which specifically cites vehicle tailpipe emissions and leads to regulations on automakers, supposedly acts as “the real harm to human health because it would lead to higher prices and reduced consumer choice,” per the Times. That is an impossibly grim sentence. It is the federal government’s abandonment of the entire idea of science and expertise taken corporeal form. It is poorly written comedy, morphed by the 16 years of time since the original finding into tragedy. It is farce without the laughs.
The repeal, which is expected to be available within days and then face a public comment period, will undoubtedly face legal challenges. It would make a mockery of the 2007 Supreme Court finding in Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the Clean Air Act does allow regulation of greenhouse gases thanks to the harm they cause, and underpins the endangerment finding two years later. Of course, SCOTUS today is very much not the SCOTUS of two decades ago; one can imagine the glee with which Samuel Alito would write the gloriously lawless majority opinion.
Last week an employee told me the remaining staff were still “limping along, still doing what we can.” According to reporting from Politico’s E&E News, EPA hasn’t even been present at White House meetings discussing revoking the endangerment finding; they are limping along, outside the crumbling edifice of American science and environmental regulation, barely allowed a glance inside.
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