Donald Trump’s climate denialism strikes again. Contradicting what science has shown for decades, the United States, after pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and even the Framework Convention on Climate Change, is continuing the ideological crusade that will erase the legal basis on which climate change is considered a threat to human health and the environment. This decision ends the U.S. government’s legal authority to control pollution levels in the United States.
“We are officially ending the so-called hazard assessment,” Donald Trump said Thursday, “a disastrous policy whose repeal has nothing to do with public health. It was all a scam, a gigantic scam. It was a scam on the country by Obama and Biden.” “We have finalized,” said Epa (Environmental protection agency) Administrator Lee Zeldin, “the greatest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America. Called by some the holy grail of federal overregulation, Obama’s 2009 hazardousness measure is now nullified.”
Hazard opinion, goodbye
The ” endangerment finding” is a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to people’s health and well-being. For nearly 17 years, the EPA has based its regulations on the findings of scientific research, limiting carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants from oil wells, pipelines, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources related to fossil fuel combustion. Trump always called this regulation a “radical norm,” claiming that it had become “the basis of the Green New Scam,” a label with which he dismisses any initiative to reduce emissions or develop renewable energy. For Trump, this would all be nothing more than a scam.
The repeal of the “hazardous opinion” paves the way for the EPA to eliminate limits on emissions from stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants. The Trump administration will also finalize the repeal of rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, backtracking from the rules approved by President Biden. The United States is currently the world’s second largest climate polluter after China, but it is the nation that has put the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Ode to fossil fuels
“Don’t worry,” the president responded Thursday at a White House event when asked if he feared these cuts would harm public health and the environment, “the endangerment finding does not and never has had any basis in fact. “Deleting it will eliminate over $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs and dramatically drop car prices. You will have a better car that starts easier, runs better and costs much less.”
The move is just one chapter in Trump’s anti-environmental crusade. Responding to reporters’ questions, the U.S. president assured that his administration’s next step will be to block the construction of wind farms in the U.S. “It’s the most expensive energy you can get (a blatant falsehood, Ed.). They’re all made in China, a little bit in Germany, but mostly in China, and they’re placing them all over our fields, ruining them, killing the birds and all that. Europe is not even recognizable anymore, between immigration and environmental problems like wind turbines, which are taking over. People hate them.”
Democrats and environmentalists mobilized
Political reactions were immediate. Barack Obama entrusts social media with a direct attack: “We will be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change, all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.” And California Governor Gavin Newsom promises legal battle: “If this ill-considered decision makes it through the lawsuits, it will lead to more deadly wildfires, more deaths from extreme heat, more climate-induced floods and droughts, and more threats to communities across the country.” He adds that California “will continue to enforce nomative limits on greenhouse gas emissions and will sue to challenge this illegal action.”
The judicial route will also be followed by one of America’s largest NGOs, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “The illegal action taken by EPA’s political leadership,” attacked its president, Fred Krupp, “dismisses the overwhelming evidence that climate pollution threatens everyone’s health and safety. This action will only increase pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harm to American families. The evidence-and the lived experiences of so many Americans-tells us that our health will suffer. Property values will fall and flood and fire insurance premiums will rise, if they are still available in some disaster-prone parts of the country. Crops and water supplies will be threatened. Many have already lost loved ones and seen homes and businesses destroyed due to climate disasters that have cost the United States more than $3 trillion since 1980, and will only intensify as pollution increases. This is the last thing American families need, as electricity bills have never been more expensive. EDF will challenge this decision in court, where evidence matters, and continue to work with all who want to build a better, safer, more prosperous future.”
A coalition of public health associations, including the American Lung Association and the American Public Health Association, has also announced a lawsuit against the administration, calling the regulatory action “unlawful.” It will be a legal battle then, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. A former senior official at Biden’s Epa told CNN that he believes Trump is prepared to play a long-term legal game. “I think their determination,” said Joe Goffman, who headed the Epa’s Office of Air and Radiation, “has been and will be to take definitive action and defend their actions in court, permanently revoking the Epa’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. They are prepared for a tough legal battle.”
