In one of its most significant reversals on climate policy to-date, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to repeal a 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced.
If successful, the repeal could strip away the federal government’s most powerful way to control the country’s planet-warming pollution and fight climate change.
The scientific finding has served as the basis of many of the Environmental Protection Agency’s most significant regulations to protect human health and environment, and decrease climate pollution from cars, power plants and the oil and gas industry.
Zeldin on Tuesday spoke proudly of his agency’s move to repeal the endangerment finding as the “largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” speaking on “Ruthless,” a conservative podcast, and referred to climate change as dogma rather than science.
“This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,” Zeldin said.
In the nearly 16 years since the EPA first issued the Supreme Court-ordered endangerment finding, the world has warmed an additional 0.45 degrees Celsius (or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) to 1.4 degrees Celsius, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.
Numerous international and US scientific findings have found “increasingly incontrovertible evidence” that humans are causing this warming by burning oil, gas and coal. Even that fraction of a degree, when spread across the planet, has had an enormous impact on our weather, water and food systems.
The world is at a dangerous threshold with individual years, including 2024, already exceeding the 1.5-degree guardrail laid out in the Paris Agreement — the point at which scientists believe the effects of climate change will likely be near impossible to reverse. Many climate scientists no longer believe the long-term target of 1.5-degrees is achievable, as fossil fuel pollution continues and the world heads closer to 3 degrees Celsius of warming during this century.
Zeldin said during the podcast he believes the scientific finding that climate change threatens human health was a guise used to attack polluting industries, and that the human health finding was “an oversimplified, I would say inaccurate, way to describe it.”
Many rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have showed both climate pollution and its warming effects are not just harming public health but killing people outright.
Rene Marsh contributed reporting.
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