by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing on Issues & Insights
As other opponents of the climate hoax do, I eagerly await the Trump administration’s termination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called endangerment finding (EF). I had imagined that the reversal would be accomplished over the course of at least a year and probably more through the conventional administrative process of notice-and-public-comment. But things may get much more exciting, much more quickly.
Some brief history is in order. The EF is a December 2009 determination by the Obama EPA that emissions of greenhouse gases harm the public health and welfare. Since that time, the EF has been the factual and scientific foundation of virtually all climate activity undertaken by the federal government.
The EF was made possible by a combination of scheming by the Clinton EPA, bungling by the Bush EPA, and judicial activism resulting in the 5-4 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court ruled that EPA may, but was not required to, regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This decision was and remains controversial because Congress had never authorized EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.
The legendary late Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., a believer in global warming but a harsh critic of EPA, thought that he and his fellow Clean Air Act co-authors had made it clear that EPA was not authorized to regulate greenhouse gases. Dingell said that they never imagined the Court would be so “stupid” as to imagine otherwise. But it was and so here we are.
