Trump's EPA embraces climate denial as it works to upend regulations

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is embracing a philosophy of climate change denial as it works to upend climate regulations and their legal underpinnings. 

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said last week that his agency will propose to repeal a 2009 determination known as the “endangerment finding” that declared that planet-warming gases including carbon dioxide are a threat to public health. 

The finding, whose proposed repeal is reportedly coming as soon as Tuesday, also declared that carbon emissions from vehicles were a contributor to the problem and served as a legal justification for climate regulations on industries such as automobiles. 

“EPA has sent to the Office of Management and Budget a proposed rule to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding from the Obama EPA,” Zeldin told Newsmax last week.

He also praised carbon dioxide as “necessary for life.”

“You have many on the left who will say ‘carbon dioxide is a pollutant’ and they won’t talk about all of the many reasons why carbon dioxide is actually necessary for life here on our planet,” he said.

Robert Brulle, a visiting research professor at Brown University, told The Hill that the administrator’s actions and comments amount to climate denial.                                                             

“Is Lee Zeldin a climate denier? Yes, I would say, by my considered professional opinion, as a person who studies climate obstruction and climate denial … yes, he's a full-fledged climate denier,” Brulle said.

He described assertions that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide do not pose a danger as irrational and unscientific.

“It's almost as if the Catholic Church is just wishing away Galileo,” he said, referring to the church’s pushback on Galileo’s conclusion that the Earth revolves around the sun. “The science is there. … You can see it. It's proven. It's fact.”

Brulle noted that assertions that carbon dioxide is good and needed for life on Earth have been used by climate deniers since the 1990s.

“It's an old staple of the climate denial movement,” he said. “They just keep running the same old tired arguments over and over and over again, hoping that people don't notice that what they're saying is absolute bulls---.”

While carbon dioxide is an important part of our ecosystem required by plants for their survival, human activities including the burning of fossil fuels and agriculture have led to an excess of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

These gases trap heat, creating a “greenhouse effect” that is heating up the planet. 

“If you increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it's going to change our climate,” said Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. “The science is extremely well-developed, extremely well-settled.”

“There are lots of things which are essential for life, but when they become in excess, are damaging pollutants. It’s not an either-or” Howarth said. 

“Yes, carbon dioxide is essential for photosynthesis. We've known that for … 200 years. And we've also known that if you put too much in the atmosphere, it's going to change the climate, and we've known that for over 150 years,” Howarth continued. 

Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, said it’s “crazy” to say that climate change isn’t a problem. 

“We're clearly getting climate extremes more frequently now. They're becoming more severe and in some cases longer duration,” he said. “When I say climate extremes, I mean extreme heat, heat waves, drought….We’re seeing more extreme rainfall that's leading to flooding.”

“All those things are happening. They're all supercharged by climate change caused by emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases,” he added.

President Trump has repeatedly denied climate change, infamously calling the phenomenon a “hoax” and downplaying impacts like rising sea levels.

During his own confirmation hearing, Zeldin acknowledged climate change’s existence saying, “I believe that climate change is real.”

Asked if there was an urgency to address climate change, Zeldin said “We must, with urgency, be addressing these issues.”

At the time, he was asked whether carbon dioxide was a pollutant and hedged his answer, saying, “The EPA has been treating it as such.”

But he also foreshadowed the administration’s anticipated takedown of the endangerment finding, declining to say he believed the EPA had an obligation to regulate climate change. 

The first Trump administration left the endangerment finding in place. It dramatically rolled back environmental regulations for vehicles and power plants, but it ultimately left some sort of regulation on the books, even if those regulations were significantly weaker than what had previously been in place.

While he did not ultimately remove the endangerment finding, Scott Pruitt, who led the EPA during the first part of Trump's first term, has denied climate change, saying he did not believe carbon dioxide is a "primary contributor" to global warming. 

Now, however, it appears to be trying to get rid of regulations altogether, including with its anticipated revocation of the endangerment finding. It also proposed to get rid of all climate regulations for power plants in June, saying in a draft rule that power plant emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated.

Joe Goffman, who led the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which deals with issues including climate change, under the Biden administration, described the Trump administration’s approach as “nihilistic.”

“It almost doesn't matter what the cause of death is, whether this is climate denial, as we have come to understand it, or it's innovative torturing of the legal authority that the agency has. The result is the same,” Goffman told The Hill.

Goffman said that getting rid of regulations altogether is likely to be worse for the climate than simply weakening them. 

“They're removing their own authority to regulate tailpipe emissions at all,” he said. “This is this really is a pure all-or-nothing proposition,” he said. 

Overpeck added that cutting U.S. emissions is important to tackle the global phenomenon.

“Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses really [do] matter. We're the number two emitter of carbon dioxide behind China,” he said. “To say the United States is not a major contributor to climate change is … just crazy talk.”