Why the EPA’s Latest Move Could Worsen the Climate Crisis

Why the EPA’s Latest Move Could Worsen the Climate Crisis

By Rachel Cleetus & Carlos Martinez

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a sweeping effort to do away with the endangerment finding, a proposal that not only disregards science but also has huge consequences for stemming the climate crisis.

This 2009 legal determination is based on extensive scientific evidence that says heat-trapping emissions from activities like the burning of fossil fuels are driving climate change and posing a threat to human health and welfare. This scientific finding, which followed a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that heat-trapping emissions are pollutants covered under the Clean Air Act, firmly established EPA’s authority and responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants, oil and gas operations, and other sources of these pollutants.

Undoing this finding is a blatant attempt to evade that responsibility and pander to fossil fuel interests. In addition to proposing to repeal the endangerment finding, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also proposed repealing greenhouse gas standards for vehicles and power plants, the two largest sources of U.S. global warming emissions. The vehicles standards were projected to reduce planet-warming emissions by more than seven billion tons over the next three decades, and the power plant carbon pollution standards were projected to limit emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide through 2047.

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As such, if the finding is successfully rescinded, EPA will have actively and intentionally walked away from its responsibility to address climate change. This abdication, coupled with actions the Trump administration and Congress are taking that hamper federal clean energy policies and investments and boost fossil fuels, are a huge blow to U.S. climate action, and will likely mean the nation’s emissions will continue to rise at a time when the science is clear that they must urgently be lowered.

Zeldin has based the rollback of the endangerment finding on a Department of Energy (DOE)–commissioned report that purports to be a “critical review of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the U.S. climate,” per the title. But in addition to being crafted by five known climate contrarians, the report is riddled with climate denial tropes, cherry-picked evidence, and distortions of the indisputably well-established facts on climate change. For example, the report claims that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are good for agriculture without acknowledging the significant negative impacts of climate-driven heat, drought and floods on crops.

Multiple scientists whose papers were cited in the report slammed the misrepresentation of their findings, pointing out how the DOE report often stated the opposite of what the peer-reviewed studies actually concluded. Ben Santer, who is among those scientists, said that the DOE report contradicted his findings while citing his research on climate “fingerprinting.” Within a day of being released, the report was already well and thoroughly on its way to being completely debunked.

But meanwhile we are watching the very agency created to protect public health and the environment completely abandon its mission and instead embrace a pro–fossil fuel agenda. Even more alarming, we are witnessing the U.S. government adopt fringe climate denial talking points as its official position over what scientific evidence has made abundantly clear. This is a dangerous moment for our nation as disinformation and lies replace facts.

Here’s the reality: since 2009 when the endangerment finding was released, the scientific evidence around fossil fuel–driven climate change and its impacts on people and the planet has only become clearer and more sobering. More than 99 percent of peer-reviewed scientific literature and every major scientific body in the world agrees on the core facts that climate change is happening with clear consequences playing out now, and that our burning of fossil fuels is primarily to blame.

Sharply cutting those emissions is crucial to limiting dangerous climate change. Hundreds of scientists have come together to write major globally relevant reports, including the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6), documenting the latest science. These reports draw on the work of thousands of underlying research papers and have undergone a rigorous and transparent review process.

As scientific methods have advanced, attribution science is another arena of rapid progress. Scientists can now determine the climate contribution to the probability or severity of individual extreme weather events such as Hurricane Helene, as well as estimate how much the emissions that come from major fossil fuel and cement companies contribute to the climate crisis.

At a time when people worldwide are reeling from extreme heat waves, worsening flooding and extreme rainfall, intensifying tropical cyclones and catastrophic wildfire seasons, it’s frankly cruel to deny the that these extreme disasters affect people’s health and well-being. Extreme weather kills, as is clear from the deaths of so many young children to floods in Kerrville, Tex., and eastern Pakistan in just the last month.

These climate extremes are ruining livelihoods and harming the economy too. Lost homes, rising insurance premiums, unhealthy outdoor working conditions, business interruptions and damaged infrastructure are all effects of a worsening climate.

With the world about to fully breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark after briefly crossing it in 2024—global climate goals are increasingly at risk. There’s no time to lose. We must quickly shift away from fossil fuels to clean energy. We must rapidly bend the global emissions curve. Yet, the U.S.—the world’s largest historical emitter—is shamefully and purposefully stepping away from the fight, and we will all suffer for it.

As scientists, and as people who care about the future of this planet and its amazing life-forms and ecosystems, we must speak up! Submit comments to the EPA and DOE pushing back against their destructive actions. Urge your representatives in Congress to defend the interests of their constituents and hold this administration accountable.

Burying facts and replacing them with propaganda is a hallmark of authoritarian governments. What’s ultimately at stake here goes far beyond any one scientific discipline or policy outcome.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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