The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday a plan to overturn its own landmark 2009 finding allowing it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).
In 2007 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that any air pollutant that could “endanger public health or welfare” may be regulated by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. In 2009 the EPA under newly elected President Obama produced a scientific report known as the “endangerment finding”, so categorizing greenhouse gases and thus permitting the EPA to regulate them for the first time.
The EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases isn’t the only tool the federal government has to fight climate change. But it has been one of the most important, particularly in accelerating coal retirements and reducing vehicle emissions.
Now the EPA under Trump is declaring that greenhouse gases are not in fact dangerous to human health - an opinion vastly at odds with mainstream scientific opinion. Indeed, the scientific consensus that climate change is dangerous and caused by human activities has only strengthened in the sixteen years since 2009.
The EPA’s opposite conclusion stems entirely from the anti-scientific way in which it chose to compile the report. As climate scientist Andrew Dessler explains:
The authors of this report are widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus. If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.1
The proposed rule now heads for public comment and could be finalized as soon as next January, thereafter restricting the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for the remaining 3 years of Trump’s term.
CO2 Little, CO2 Late
The process of the reversing the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding has been comically inept and ethically outrageous - but the practical effects are much smaller than most headlines suggest. Both light vehicle manufacturers and the electrical generation industry are already so far down the path of decarbonization it’s virtually impossible for them to turn back. And the likely reimposition of GHG regulation in a future Democratic administration means they won’t even try.
Global automakers will not suddenly abandon plans to convert their fleet to electric vehicles simply because one of the many markets into which they sell has loosened emissions regulations for 3 years. Similarly, no one is going to finance a new coal plant in the United States that could be regulated out of existence by the time it finishes construction.
The EPA’s GHG regulatory authority is most useful in pressuring hard-to-abate industries such as steel, cement and aviation to move towards decarbonization. But nobody expected the Trump administration to do that anyway.
Gutting the EPA’s regulatory teeth for the remainder of Trump’s term will harm decarbonization efforts around the margins. It may push back the timeline for electrifying long haul trucking, for example, or delay the closure of a few coal plants. But executive orders and formal determinations are not permanent. A future pro-climate administration can reverse the finding and get the United States back on track to its net-zero by 2050 goal.
Nulla Scientia, Pax Sinica
Much more concerning than the EPA controversy’s material impacts are its implications for the United States’ relationship to science writ large. The Trump administration’s ideologically-driven suppression of climate science recalls Germany’s Jüdische Physik or the Soviet Union’s attempts to promote Lysenkoism, a pseudoscientific denial of genetics, more than anything in the American tradition.
The United States was forged in the fires of the Enlightenment, and consequently she has always been a pro-science nation. Benjamin Franklin himself was an accomplished scientist and irrespective of politics would have been in the history books for his groundbreaking experiments with electricity. In a 1780 letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestly, Franklin wrote of humanity’s scientific endeavour with reverence:
I always rejoice to hear of your being still employ’d in Experimental Researches into Nature, and of the Success you meet with. The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried in a 1000 Years the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity & give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labour & double its Produce. All Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard.2
No one would have mistaken George Washington for a scientist. He was, however, a pro-vaccine pragmatist who would have despised the antivax morons currently running the Department of Health and Human Services. In a 1777 letter to a Continental Army doctor the nation’s first president wrote:
Finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running thro’ the whole of our Army, I have determined that the Troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust, in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army, in the natural way, and rage with its usual Virulence, we should have more to dread from it, than from the sword of the enemy.3
Thomas Jefferson, for his part, was amongst the most erudite men of his time. His private book collection formed the nucleus of the Library of Congress, the greatest attempt by a state to accumulate bibliographic knowledge since the ancient Library of Alexandria. Jefferson also founded the University of Virginia, commissioned the Lewis & Clark expedition and in 1807 established the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the forerunner of today’s NOAA - the agency most responsible for climate science.
America’s scientific development continued apace throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the more striking manifestations of American exceptionalism are the dozens of otherwise unremarkable Midwestern towns like Ann Arbor, Ames and Madison whose universities rival and in many ways surpass the likes of Oxford and Cambridge. These places were cornfields in the not too distant past, but arose to global prominence because the American people - though their governments - invested in scientific excellence.
And those investments paid enormous dividends. Some of the greatest scientific achievements of all time were made in America - microprocessors, the polio vaccine, the internet, the moon landing, and the robotic exploration of the outer planets just to name a few. The economic rewards have also been mighty. The application of science to industry has been the basis of American prosperity from DuPont to Edison Electric to Ford to Boeing to Google.
Imagine if in the 19th Century the federal government had dismissed electricity as “fake news” or some sort of “vile sorcery” and decided to massively subsidize the candle making and oil lamp industries instead. This is essentially what the Trump administration aims to do by kneecapping clean technologies and pampering fossil fuels.
Almost every great scientific discovery has an equally great economic opportunity attached - and climate change is no exception. While the United States is arguing about whether or not climate change exists, China is busy building multiple trillion dollar industries dedicated to solving it. If America continues on its path of climate denial it risks becoming a giant version of Cuba, a place where people putter around in dirty antiquated vehicles - ideologically pure but economically and technologically inferior to its rivals.
Such an outcome stalks the American republic. But only if the administration’s war on science remains unopposed. Founding Fathers like Jefferson, Franklin and Washington bequeathed to us more than just a healthy respect for science. They also gave us methods to correct poor political leadership. And in the 2026 and 2028 elections the American electorate should reject the strange anti-scientific cult that has taken hold in Washington and elect leaders worthy of the name.
In the meantime, China will be laughing at us - and counting its profits.
https://x.com/AndrewDessler/status/1950397627478016255/photo/1
Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, 8 February 1780 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-31-02-0325
George Washington to William Shippen, Jr., February 6, 1777, in National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-08-02-0281.