Citing climate “alarmists,” Zeldin scraps US EPA’s basis for regulating greenhouse gases
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has officially revoked the “endangerment finding,” erasing the agency’s authority to set emission standards for cars, trucks and power plants, and to require fossil fuel companies to report their emissions.
The 2009 finding that six greenhouse gases threaten public health gave the agency legal backing under the Clean Air Act to combat climate change.
The EPA said scrapping it will bring down costs for companies and consumers, but health and environmental groups said the move will lead to more disease and death and climate instability.
“Where our predecessors focused on trying to please a few fear-mongering climate alarmists, the Trump EPA is making decisions to benefit all Americans based on common sense and reality,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said at a White House press briefing.
At the briefing, President Donald Trump called the move the “single largest deregulatory action in American history … by far.”
“This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically,” said Trump. “Over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world.”
The move has been met with widespread outrage from advocates for health and the environment.
“It is impossible to imagine a morally defensible reason for Administrator Zeldin’s decision to end EPA’s responsibility for cutting the climate pollution that is endangering peoples’ health, harming children, and destabilizing our country,” Dominique Browning, director of the group Moms Clean Air Force, said in a statement. “It is not supported by the very evidence we are all feeling at home every month, as heat waves intensify and storms are turbocharged,” she said.
The same emissions causing global temperatures to climb are harmful to human health, with 85% of global air pollution resulting from the burning of fossil fuels or organic matter, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
The loss of protections resulting from the endangerment finding will lead to higher levels of dangerous air pollutants and more severe smog that will trigger more asthma attacks, hospital visits, and premature deaths, according to the American Lung Association.
“This is corruption, plain and simple,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said at a rally of climate change and environmental groups outside the EPA headquarters in Washington, DC on Wednesday ahead of the announcement.
“This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters against their clean energy competition,” Whitehouse said.
The Feb. 12 announcement comes after the agency on July 29 submitted a proposal to rescind the endangerment finding, despite alarm from scientists and public health advocates.
Over 600 members of the public spoke overwhelmingly in opposition to the proposal at an August hearing, and the EPA received over 500,000 public comments in response to the proposal.
The decision to revoke the endangerment finding follows a new rule published last month by the administration that states the EPA will no longer consider the economic benefits of protecting human health as it regulates fine particles and ozone air pollutants.
The move also comes on the heels of the US officially withdrawing for a second time from the Paris Climate Agreement, which “sets a disturbing precedent that seeks to instigate a race to the bottom,” Marta Schaaf, a program director for the group Amnesty International, said in a statement.
Featured image: Ten-year-old Talia with Moms Clean Air Force and other climate activists protest Zeldin’s decision at a rally outside the US EPA headquarters on Feb. 11. (Shannon Kelleher/The New Lede)
