Stupid EPA Chief Tells Stupid Trump To Repeal EPA's Authority On Greenhouse Gases

Presidents don't get to decide what science is.

I wish our stock photo server would include basic information on where the photos were taken and what’s in ‘em. This is just “factory smoke coming out from factory.” But if you’re burning, you’re doing CO2. Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

The Trump administration appears to be ready to take another wrecking ball to climate science, according to a report in the Washington Post Wednesday (archive dot ph link). EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, acting on yet another of Trump’s first-day executive orders, “has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change, according to three people briefed on the matter,” who were all not named because they aren’t authorized to say what’s going on in the Fascism Factory.

Zeldin wants Trump to do away with the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health, an official statement of widely held scientific consensus that underpins the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide, methane, and other planet warming gases under the Clean Air Act. It’s kind of a big deal, and wiping it away is just one more step in the administration’s agenda of replacing science with far-Right ideology that removes legal constraints on fossil fuel use.

No, guess we aren’t telling you anything all that new, are we?

The original 2009 finding was based on over 100 peer reviewed scientific papers on climate change, involved the work of hundreds of scientists, and included over 500 pages of public comment. It came in response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act; that ruling directed GW Bush’s EPA to stop fucking around and make a formal determination as to whether greenhouse gases endanger human health or welfare. Bush’s EPA finished its assessment in 2007, determining that yes indeedy, greenhouse gases are not healthy for children or other living things.

Notoriously, however, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget refused to open the email with the EPA finding, leaving it to whoever won the 2008 presidential election. We shit you not!

Barack Obama’s administration did its own version of the “endangerment finding,” which went through all the proper rule-making processes, and that’s the one that Zeldin’s EPA wants to undo. Eventually, the 28-page Bush EPA finding was also released in response to a public records request; at the time, an Obama EPA spokesperson said the earlier document “demonstrates that in 2007 the science was as clear as it is today.”

But three months ago, thanks to a narrow plurality of votes, science suddenly became totally different, because Trump and his crowd say it is. Isn’t science amazing?

As the Post explains, Trump’s executive order told the EPA to review the

“legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. The order gave Zeldin 30 days to submit recommendations to Russell Vought, the head of the White House budget office.

And you can just bet that Trump knew exactly what he was ordering! No way some oil lobbyists wrote that EO for him.

This time out, it appears that the EPA has completed its review and found that greenhouse gases are in fact no big deal, but we won’t see the finding until the administration is good and ready. EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou didn’t offer any comment to the Post either, simply saying in an email that “EPA is in compliance with this aspect of the President’s Executive Order.”

We bet once it’s released, it’ll be backed up by some very compelling science, like calling climate change a Marxist plot to destroy American prosperity. Those three anonymous insiders say that the effort to undo the endangerment finding has been getting advice from “Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff at the end of Trump’s first term and wrote the EPA chapter in the conservative blueprint Project 2025,” and that’s probably all the science necessary. Gunasekara is so good at science that she’s not only a climate and energy expert, she also moonlights as an expert for Republican congressional hearings on how woke corporations are turning children transgender, so how’s that for a broad range of expertise? Yes, we know: You were told there’d be no polymaths.

Haha, we are kidding! In fact, Ms. Gunasekara probably knows less about climate science — or any science — than the average blogger, because she is not a scientist at all, but a paid liar about science. She has an undergrad degree in communication and media studies, and a law degree from U of Mississippi, and that’s enough to have gotten her quite a few jobs lobbying against science and praising the poor victimized oil industry.

One of her early jobs was as an aide to the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma); Gunasekara was the lucky staffer who got to hand him the very snowball that he tossed on the Senate floor in 2015 to prove there’s no such thing as global warming.

That was a decade ago, and despite that demonstration, the planet has just kept getting hotter. That’s the thing about science: It’s true even if you don’t believe it. It’s true even if it leads to conclusions that might hurt oil industry profits. It will keep being true even when (we could say “if,” but come on) the EPA proclaims that greenhouse gases do not endanger humans and that Donald Trump is wearing a fine new suit of clothes that only smart people can see.

Needless to say, climate advocates aren’t planning to let Mad King Donald redefine greenhouse gases as Our Industrious Friends, even if his uncle was a professor at MIT and he has a “natural instinct for science.” David Doniger, an attorney and senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Washington Post that if Trump’s EPA “proceeds down this path and jettisons the obvious finding that climate change is a threat to our health and welfare,” well then, “We will see them in court.”

And even if the Supreme Court somehow decides science isn’t real and that a president has the power to nullify it, setting back the fight against climate change for as long as he holds power and making America a pariah nation, we can still point to the evidence — the rest of the world will keep it — and say, “And yet it warms.”

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[WaPo (archive link) / Environmental Defense Fund / NRDC / LAT (2009) / DeSmog]

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