The “Endangerment Finding” (EF) created in 2009, by the Obama-Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and placed on steroids by the Biden-Harris administration, allowed the federal government to regulate everything from gas-powered vehicles to placing restrictions on agriculture under the radical Green New Deal.
The “endangerment finding” led to trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes by regulating pollutants, such as ozone, particulate matter, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane gas, and others that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
But last week, the Trump administration ended this malfeasance of an overzealous federal agency. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it “Climate Regulation Liberation Day.”
By rescinding the CO2 endangerment finding, “it removes the basis for all of the climate nonsense that we’ve had to endure for the last several decades,” stated Marc Morano with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
Congressman Mark Messmer (R-IN) said “[T]he Endangerment Finding has long been a…tool to issue burdensome regulations that ignore commonsense science in pursuit of radical Green New Deal aligned agendas.”
As reported in Liberty Matters in March, President Trump issued an Executive Order on day one called “Power the American Great Comeback.” From this EO, the President gave U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin 30 days to make recommendations regarding “the legality and continuing applicability of the Green House Gas (GHG) rule.
Zeldin issued a formal reconsideration of the “Endangerment Finding” along with 31 historic deregulatory actions to address GHG regulations. One of those actions pertains to overhauling Biden’s “Social Cost of Carbon.”
Obama’s EPA created the EF after the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA (reported here in Liberty Matters). The Biden administration doubled down on the EF ruling to implement its overreaching and insane climate agenda, which included his 30×30 land grab.
Most notably, EPA’s endangerment finding was based largely on studies compiled by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, rather than on its own scientific assessments. The EPA found that CO2 and other greenhouse gases “contribute to” dangerous air pollution in the form of climate change.
After Trump issued his EO, Zeldin said: “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age” marking “the death of the Green New Scam.”
As Marc Morano stated: “CO2, the invisible, odorless gas you just exhaled, is not a pollutant. It is certainly not what Congress intended when it enacted the Clean Air Act.”
Go here to read the EPA’s proposed rule to reconsider the EF and EPA’s press release of July 29 rescinding the EF finding. Also here to read EPA’s EF one-page explanation.
Read CFACT’s story here.
