Which is the greater public menace: ubiquitous greenhouse gases or the contraction of economic liberty necessary to limit their emission? For over 15 years, the federal government chose to target the former at the seemingly limitless expense of the latter. But not anymore.
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would formally revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding from 2009 that the atmospheric concentrations of six greenhouse gases posed a danger to the public by exacerbating global warming. Under the Clean Air Act, which grants the EPA its authority to regulate air pollutants, this “endangerment finding” fulfilled the statutory requirement that the agency needed to issue manifold rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from sources across the U.S. economy.
Most notably, the endangerment finding has been cited to justify ever-tightening standards for new vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions — including the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate that it tried to sneak through the regulatory back door. Bureaucrats have been instructed to regulate major industries based on their alleged climate risks, aiming far beyond the toxic air pollutants that can directly harm people’s health.
Greenhouse gases, by contrast, are harmless for humans to inhale in normal concentrations. The EPA during the Obama administration asserted, however, that by trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere and gradually raising its temperature, the emission of these gases threatens the “public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
Regardless of how climate change will affect Americans’ health and welfare decades from now, the EPA’s finding was a gross mutilation of the Clean Air Act’s plain meaning, which allows only for the regulation of harmful air pollution. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, as a natural and eternal component of the atmosphere, by their nature cannot be considered air pollutants. Neither are such substances threatening, if the word has any limits to its meaning, as they do no injury to those who breathe them in. The negative effects of greenhouse gases on human welfare via climate change — if they ever materialize in the face of adaptation — are purely theoretical and indirect.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court opened the door to the endangerment finding by endorsing an overly capacious definition of air pollution in the 2007 case of Massachusetts v. EPA. The Massachusetts government had sued the agency during the George W. Bush administration, claiming that it had failed to meet its statutory obligations by declining to regulate greenhouse gases as dangerous air pollutants. A 5–4 majority concurred, with all the originalist justices in dissent, cajoling the EPA to exercise a scientific judgment it did not see the evidence to support. If a new lawsuit challenging the endangerment finding’s revocation brings the issue back to the Supreme Court, the current bench should happily reverse its past error.
As the EPA retracts its climate rules in the months to come, the biggest winners will be consumers and businesses. Car buyers will be able to shop for cheaper vehicles that aren’t required to capture every nontoxic emission from their tailpipes. The administration expects manufacturers and small businesses to see hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative regulatory relief.
If nothing else, the end of the endangerment finding is a triumph for realistic governance over moral fanaticism, since the EPA was never going to avert significant climate change with any regulatory scheme it could devise. The United States contributes less than 13 percent of global emissions — a shrinking share. Developing countries such as China and India are now responsible for most emissions because of the burgeoning energy needs of their populations. If the country somehow achieved President Biden’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 — which was never remotely possible — it might reduce global temperatures by one tenth of a degree by the end of this century.
America has a federal government of limited powers and even more limited capabilities. Controlling the trajectory of global temperatures was never one of either. The Trump administration deserves credit for finally telling the EPA to stick to actual air pollution.