Buidling climate resiliency with or without the EPA

By The Herald Editorial Board

There’s an ironic literary parallel for an Environmental Protection Agency — under leadership of the Trump administration’s Lee Zeldin — that now ignores the first two words in its name: The “firemen” in Ray Bradbury’s classic “Fahrenheit 451” don’t put out fires; armed with flamethrowers, they torch libraries and piles of books.

Zeldin announced last week that the Environmental Protection Agency would seek to rescind the 2009 declaration, made during the Obama administration, known as the endangerment finding. The finding, following years of review of scientific research, concluded that six greenhouse gases, among them carbon dioxide and methane, were warming the planet and posed a threat to public health. That finding was used as the basis by the Obama and Biden administrations under the Clean Air Act to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution. Those regulations and tools are, for the moment, projected to limit billions of tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere that would continue to contribute to the rise of global temperatures, creating conditions that are raising sea levels, melting ice caps and glaciers and strengthening the intensity of climate events, including extreme heat events, flooding, droughts, storms and more.

The long-lasting danger in this latest Trump administration undoing of norms is that rescinding the finding is much easier — even though it likely faces a long court challenge — than it will be to reinstate such a standard, hobbling future administrations’ efforts to again regulate emissions and limit the worst of the climate crisis.

Zeldin and the Trump administration believe ending the endangerment finding will unfetter the U.S. economy. Zeldin told a conservative podcast this week that the deregulation he seeks will save U.S. businesses more than $1 trillion; impressive, maybe, until you take a wider view.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-buidling-climate-resiliency-with-or-without-the-epa/