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Science-denying, fossil fuel puppets getting ready to kill EPA's best tool to address climate crisis [1]
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Date: 2025-07-22
In what should surprise nobody since it’s been a long time coming, Lisa Friedman at The New York Times is reporting tonight that the Environmental Protection Agency is prepared to reverse its 2009 “endangerment” finding. This provides the government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that cause global warming, which is harmful to humans:
That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet. The E.P.A. proposal, which is expected to be made public within days, also calls for rescinding limits on tailpipe emissions that were designed to encourage automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles. Those regulations, which were based on the endangerment finding, were a fundamental part of the Biden administration’s efforts to move the country away from gasoline-powered vehicles. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States
Just one more example of how the Trump administration has been careful not to destroy the EPA outright, merely cripple it by shrinking its staff, its budget, and its authority, while turning its mission upside down. Anybody who had read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto knew the EPA was targeted since it is mentioned 1,961 times in that document.
Trump’s wide-ranging Unleashing American Energy executive order mandating (§6f) a report in 30 days "on the legality and continuing applicability" of the ruling was issued in January.
The underpinning for the EPA’s endangerment finding came in 2007, in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA. The agency under President George W. Bush had chosen not to regulate carbon emissions, and Massachusetts sued. From Oyez:
The opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens held that Massachusetts, due to its "stake in protecting its quasi-sovereign interests" as a state, had standing to sue the EPA over potential damage caused to its territory by global warming. The Court rejected the EPA's argument that the Clean Air Act was not meant to refer to carbon emissions in the section giving the EPA authority to regulate "air pollution agent[s]". The Act's definition of air pollutant was written with "sweeping," "capacious" language so that it would not become obsolete. Finally, the majority ruled that the EPA was unjustified in delaying its decision on the basis of prudential and policy considerations. The Court held that if the EPA wishes to continue its inaction on carbon regulation, it is required by the Act to base the decision on a consideration of "whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change." Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion argued that Massachusetts should not have had standing to sue, because the potential injuries from global warming were not concrete or particularized (individual and personal). Justice Scalia's dissent argued that the Clean Air Act was intended to combat conventional lower-atmosphere pollutants and not global climate change.
As Friedman notes, consequent to that decision, the EPA looked into the impacts of six greenhouse gases and in more than 200 pages “outlined the science and detailed how increasingly severe heat waves, storms and droughts were expected to contribute to higher rates of death and disease.”
Since the emissions are harmful to health given that human-caused climate change sickens and kills people in a variety of ways, experts have since argued that it would be hard to kill the 16-year-old endangerment ruling because, you know, facts.
Unfortunately, we live in post-fact America. An America where none of the five justices who ruled to authorize the EPA to assess whether greenhouse gases endangered people are still on the Supreme Court, but three of the justices who voted against the EPA’s jurisdiction in the matter are still there.
It would be better to be ruled by outright fools than these manipulated marionettes.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/22/2334731/-Climate-science-denying-fossil-fuel-puppets-ready-to-kill-EPA-s-best-tool-to-address-climate-crisis?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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