In one of its most significant reversals on climate policy to-date, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to repeal a 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced.
If successful, the repeal could strip away the federal government’s most powerful way to control the country’s planet-warming pollution and fight climate change.
The scientific finding has served as the basis of many of the Environmental Protection Agency’s most significant regulations to protect human health and environment, and decrease climate pollution from cars, power plants and the oil and gas industry.
Zeldin on Tuesday spoke proudly of his agency’s move to repeal the endangerment finding as the “largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” speaking on “Ruthless,” a conservative podcast, and referred to climate change as dogma rather than science.
“This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,” Zeldin said.
In addition to reversing the endangerment finding, the EPA’s proposal also seeks to repeal rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, since they stem from the finding. The Biden EPA sought to tighten those standards to prod the auto industry to make more fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles.
In the nearly 16 years since the EPA first issued the Supreme Court-ordered endangerment finding, the world has warmed an additional 0.45 degrees Celsius (or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) to 1.4 degrees Celsius, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.
Numerous international and US scientific findings have found “increasingly incontrovertible evidence” that humans are causing this warming by burning oil, gas and coal. Even that fraction of a degree, when spread across the planet, has had an enormous impact on our weather, water and food systems.
The world is at a dangerous threshold with individual years, including 2024, already exceeding the 1.5-degree guardrail laid out in the Paris Agreement — the point at which scientists believe the effects of climate change will likely be near impossible to reverse. Many climate scientists no longer believe the long-term target of 1.5-degrees is achievable, as fossil fuel pollution continues and the world heads closer to 3 degrees Celsius of warming during this century.
Zeldin said during the podcast he believes the scientific finding that climate change threatens human health was a guise used to attack polluting industries, and that the human health finding was “an oversimplified, I would say inaccurate, way to describe it.”
Many rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have showed both climate pollution and its warming effects are not just harming public health but killing people outright.
The Trump administration has also commissioned a new report on climate change and climate science in conjunction with its proposed regulatory repeals, Energy Sec. Chris Wright announced during a Tuesday afternoon press conference.
Wright’s Energy Department recently hired three prominent researchers who have questioned and even rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, CNN previously reported — John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
The report was not immediately available, and Energy Department spokespeople didn’t reply to CNN’s request for comment whether Christy, Spencer and Koonin were involved in it.
Wright said climate change “is a real, physical phenomenon” that is “worthy of study” and “even some action.”
“But what we have done instead is nothing related to the actual science of climate change or pragmatic ways to make progress,” Wright said. “The politics of climate change have shrunk your life possibilities, have put your business here at threat.”
Hausfather strongly pushed back the idea that the scientific record shows anything other than climate change presenting danger to humans. The findings of international climate scientists have been reaffirmed in the fourth and fifth US climate assessments, the former of which was released during the first Trump administration.
“Both the scientific certainty around climate change and evidence of the dangers it is causing have grown stronger since 2009,” Hausfather told CNN in an email. “There is no evidence that has emerged or been published in the scientific literature in the past 16 years that would in any way challenge the scientific basis of the 2009 endangerment finding.”
Global warming is supercharging extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation, heat waves and wildfires. It is making these extremes more likely, intense and in some cases, longer-lasting.
“These changes in climate have moved out of the domain of pure science into the domain of everyday life,” said Phil Duffy, a climate scientist and former Biden official in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Duffy, who lives in California, said he can now only buy wildfire insurance through the state insurer of last resort — a reality for many Californians as wildfires are increasing in size amid hotter temperatures.
“The evidence (in 2009) was overwhelming, but it’s even stronger now,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional information. Rene Marsh contributed reporting.
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