Trump's EPA Having Real Hard Time Trying To Kill Climate Regulations, So That's, We Don't Know, Sad?

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S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

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In yet another sign that the Trump administration is as stupid and incompetent as it is evil, the Washington Post reports (gift link) that White House officials and the Environmental Protection Agency are squabbling about continuing to regulate climate-warming greenhouse gases. As soon as he was confirmed to the job, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made it a top priority to roll back the 2009 legal opinion on the Clean Air Act that found greenhouse gases endanger human health. But now at least a few legal wonks in the White House are worried that the EPA's proposal to repeal that "endangerment finding" is too slapdash to hold up to legal challenges.

In March of last year, Zeldin announced that by "reviewing" the legal basis for the EPA to regulate climate-warming gases, "We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion." Thing is, courts are remarkably uninterested in snarky dismissals of science like that. They wanna see the science, and now the administration is worried that Zeldin's EPA hasn't brought enough legal and scientific support for rolling back the Obama-era rules.

Just to review, the 2009 "endangerment finding" EPA wants to roll back formally summed up the scientific consensus — which hasn't changed since then! — that greenhouse gases "endanger public health and welfare." Under the Clean Air Act, that finding obligates the EPA to limit how much of those harmful gases are spewed into the atmosphere. Getting rid of it would end the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles and from power plants, which would be a huge gift to the fossil fuel industry.

Wonkette used to think it was cool, runnin' around on fossil fuel. But we found out what we were doin' was drivin' down the road to ruin.

In July of last year, Zeldin's EPA actually rolled out its proposed rule to repeal the endangerment finding, which as we reviewed at the time, has a long, complicated history and was built to withstand legal challenges from the oil, gas, and coal industries that now are subject to regulation. But like so many laws (and literal buildings) that seemed to rest on a solid foundation, it was vulnerable to being bulldozed by an administration that didn't give two shits about laws or science.

EPA rules have to be based on the best available science, which is why the 2009 endangerment finding relied on more than 100 peer reviewed scientific papers on climate change, nailing down the evidence that climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels, is not healthy for children and other living things. For more on that, see this piece by Marcus Sarofim, an EPA science and policy analyst who worked on the 2009 endangerment finding and recently resigned from his "unicorn job" at EPA because the agency has rejected science altogether.

Zeldin's effort to undo the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases was based on a hastily-tossed-together Energy Department report barfed out by a "climate working group" of five fringey "experts" hired by Energy Secretary Chris Wright (NYT archive link) specifically for the purpose of undermining the endangerment finding. The report attempted to claim that, because some aspects of global warming are still not fully understood, the basic scientific consensus is flawed (it is not), and that the US may as well not try to reduce greenhouse emissions anyway because other countries pollute more than we do.

That cherry-picked Energy Department report has been debunked as "fundamentally incorrect" by real climate scientists in dozens of publications since it was published, both in the popular press and in detailed scientific reports, such as this September report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, which finds that since the 2009 endangerment finding was adopted, the evidence that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health has only continued to get stronger, and is "beyond scientific dispute."

Which brings us back to that Washington Post story: According to two inside sources, the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is worried that because the Energy Department report it's based on is shit, the EPA rule repealing the endangerment finding won't stand up to scrutiny in federal courts.

David Doniger, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of several environmental groups ready to sue the EPA the moment its rule is finalized, tells the Post that the Trump working group's "work was obliterated. The criticism leaves nothing standing."

Rather than barging ahead and finalizing the rule right away, as the EPA wants to do, OIRA Associate Administrator Jeffrey Clark — yes, that Jeffrey Clark, the Jeffrey Clark who tried to cancel the 2020 election — is urging the EPA to take some time to build up its legal and scientific case for repeal.

The anonymous insiders told the Post that EPA officials "are resisting revisions to the policy and arguing that the regulation should be finalized and announced publicly in its current form as soon as possible," because when have any of the assholes in this administration bothered actually building a solid case for anything? They appear to be confident that once a lawsuit results in the repeal being thrown out because the science is bogus, the Supreme Court will obligingly decide to tip the scales in favor of the EPA anyway, possibly even overturning the 2007 SCOTUS decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that found that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are "pollutants" subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

As the Post points out, Clark was a deputy assistant AG in George W. Bush's Justice Department and was on the losing federal side of the Massachusetts case, so presumably he has some idea of how courts view cases with crappy scientific evidence.

At the moment, the administration is pretending that everyone is on board with wiping away the endangerment finding, regardless of how weak the case is. EPA spokesliar Brigit Hirsch, the Post reports,

confirmed in a statement that the repeal proposal was sent to OIRA on Jan. 7, but did not respond to questions about disagreement over revising the policy. The endangerment finding was used to "justify trillions of dollars in greenhouse gas regulations," and the agency is following the law in seeking to repeal it, she said.

In addition, a spox for Office of Management and Budget, the parent agency of OIRA, insisted that "OIRA, EPA, and the entire administration are working in lockstep to execute on the President's deregulation agenda," like one big happy family.

We can only assume, based on those mutual statements, that everything is going smoothly, that the attempt to roll back the endangerment finding is not going very pear-shaped. Not mentioned in the Post story is that earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the release of internal documents confirming that the climate working group was created with the express purpose of producing a pre-determined conclusion supporting the repeal of the 2009 finding. Rather than producing an objective scientific assessment, the documents show that Energy Secretary Wright made clear to members of the working group that their assignment was to undermine the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

It's pretty damning stuff, and will make it difficult to claim that the repeal has anything to do with science at all. See what happens when you take notes on a criminal conspiracy?