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<\/p>\n Email Link<\/p>\n \n In one of its most significant reversals on climate policy to-date, the Trump administration on Tuesday proposed to repeal a 2009 scientific finding<\/a> 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\u2019s most powerful way<\/a> to control the country\u2019s planet-warming pollution and fight climate change.\n <\/p>\n \n The repeal was based in part on a hastily produced report \u2014 authored by five researchers who have spent years sowing doubt in the scientific consensus around climate change \u2014 that questions the severity of the impacts of climate change.\n <\/p>\n \n The 2009 scientific finding at the heart of this repeal has served as the basis of many of the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s most significant regulations to protect human health and environment, and decrease climate pollution from cars, power plants and the oil and gas industry.\n <\/p>\n \n Zeldin on Tuesday spoke proudly of his agency\u2019s move to repeal the endangerment finding as the \u201clargest deregulatory action in the history of America,\u201d speaking on \u201cRuthless,\u201d a conservative podcast, and referred to climate change as dogma rather than science.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,\u201d Zeldin said.\n <\/p>\n \n In addition to reversing the endangerment finding, the EPA\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n \n The text of the proposal said that while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in the atmosphere, it has been \u201cdriven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources,\u201d and has happened \u201cwithout producing the degree of adverse impacts to public health and welfare in the United States that the EPA anticipated in the 2009 Endangerment Finding.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The US is the world\u2019s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and historically has emitted<\/a> more planet-warming pollution than any other country. 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.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n 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.\n <\/p>\n \n Numerous international and US scientific findings have found \u201cincreasingly incontrovertible evidence\u201d 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.\n <\/p>\n \n 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 \u2014 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.\n <\/p>\n \n 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 \u201can oversimplified, I would say inaccurate, way to describe it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The Trump administration commissioned the 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. The document calls into question the seriousness of climate impacts and informed EPA\u2019s repeal of the endangerment finding, according to the proposal.\n <\/p>\n
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