emissions sanity returns to EPA

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, climate change wasn’t on anyone’s mind.

Yet under an Obama-era decision known as the “Endangerment Finding,” the Environmental Protection Agency has claimed authority under the act to micromanage large parts of the American economy in the name of combating global warming.

President Donald Trump’s proposal to reverse the finding returns the Clean Air Act to its original purpose, marking the end of a failed effort to control the climate through executive fiat.

The Endangerment Finding stemmed from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required the EPA to determine whether carbon dioxide qualified as a dangerous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts warned that the decision “ignores the complexities” of addressing global warming through the statute — but suggested its effects “may be more symbolic than anything else.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama sought to push a bipartisan climate bill through Congress — but when lawmakers failed to act on his terms, he turned to executive authority.

In 2009, Obama’s EPA responded to the high court’s decision and declared that six greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, endanger public health and welfare — and therefore required regulation.

Unfortunately, the structure of the Clean Air Act is not conducive to regulating CO2, because it’s designed to regulate industry.

Yet CO2 is not just emitted by factories and cars but by every human, frog, parakeet and muskrat, among other animals.

The act required federal permits for any source that emitted more than 100 tons per year of an air pollutant.

By this measure, some families would need permits just to maintain their households under the Endangerment Finding.

Realizing that the law could sweep up hundreds of thousands of stores, apartments, hotels and other small establishments, the agency said it would regulate only sites emitting more than 100,000 tons of CO2 — a number it picked out of thin air.

The EPA’s attempts to use the act to regulate emissions unleashed endless litigation.

In 2014, the Supreme Court overturned the 100,000-ton permit standard, which two justices called “patently unreasonable.”

In 2022, the Supreme Court said that the EPA’s mandate to shut down a substantial part of the nation’s coal-fired power plants and substitute them with gas and renewables also couldn’t be squared with the act.

One sticking point was that the Clean Air Act focused on regulating emissions through technological additions to cars and factories, such as smokestack scrubbers.

But unlike other pollutants, there’s no easy way to capture greenhouse gases: If you burn fossil fuels, the CO2 must go somewhere, and that generally means into the atmosphere.

The only way to control most greenhouse gases is to mandate less use of fossil-fuel-derived energy. Such mandates were never the purpose or intention of the Clean Air Act.

Absurd actions resulted. Cars and trucks are some of the main emitters of CO2, and they were the focus of the EPA’s original finding.

But no technologies exist to eliminate CO2 from gas-powered vehicles, so the EPA simply imposed stricter gas-mileage standards — even though Congress had already established a separate Transportation Department program to regulate fuel economy.

The Biden administration went further, issuing rules under the finding that would require about two-thirds of new cars and trucks to be electric by 2032, an attempt to overhaul the entire American automobile fleet.

The estimated costs surpassed $1 trillion, making them among the most expensive regulatory actions in history.

And because the government also offered separate subsidies for electric vehicle purchases, the regulations stood to add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit — again, without any congressional approval.

These regulatory contortions reveal the folly of using questionable statutory language, rather than clear congressional action, to make major decisions that reshape American society.

Those who view climate change as an existential threat have a duty to persuade the public of that claim.

If addressing climate change truly requires making sweeping changes to how we live, then advocates must build a broad-based coalition to pass laws mandating those changes — not bypass the democratic process through executive fiat.

Trump’s proposal to repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, detailed in over 300 pages by the EPA last week, will put a stop to regulations that swelled the deficit, raised prices and hurt consumers.

It will also restore Congress’ original understanding of the Clean Air Act, stop a flood of ineffective executive mandates — and make overreaching bureaucrats get back in their lane.

Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from City Journal.