EPA Endangerment Finding Goes Extinct

This shark was jumped a long time ago, but better late than never

Over at the Daily Caller, Steve Milloy, a long time opponent of shoddy (or “junk”) climate science, and shoddier and even junkier climate policy, chronicles the rise and fall of EPA’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding,” which declared that, “The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” It’s a worthwhile read.

The endangerment finding was promulgated when Carol Browner, the notoriously mendacious former EPA administrator and Al Gore Acolyte was heading up the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under Obama. Milloy documents how the endangerment finding was used to begin regulating “smokestack and tailpipe” emissions of greenhouse gases in the US. The upshot is, Congress had not intended to let EPA regulate greenhouse gases, but left a loophole in the Clean Air Act that the Obama EPA exploited, an Obama-era judge upheld, and we were off to the emission-control races.

To me, this was actually EPA’s Jump The Shark moment.

While climate change was a raging “inside baseball” policy battle since James Hansen’s 1988 Congressional testimony, it was, up until the Endangerment finding, still something of an abstract thing to the public, a threat relatively ill-defined, and far off in the future. People were safe humoring that idea because, up until 2009, it was not driving much in the way of significant public policies. All the appliance standards and energy-related things before Endangerment weren’t so much climate-driven, as “energy-efficiency” fetishism carried over from the 1970s, and the result of efforts to control regular conventional air pollutants – the kind that did a lot of real harm way back then. (I grew up in L.A., and had asthma from about 13 y.o., so trust me, I’m not in any way a pollution denier or minimizer).

But the reason I say it was a Jumping the Shark moment was because the EPA made a huge mistake. It made the abstract “we might have to act on this someday, and someone will have to pay” into a current-moment concrete reality: “We have to act on this, now, and you, personally, will have to pay, now.” And that regulatory gun-to-the-head as they say, focused people’s attention marvelously, and made them ask, “is this problem real, and do I have to (and want to) pay for it right now? The answer, based on people’s subsequent voting patterns, polls about their greatest concerns, and their consumer choices (SUVs, anyone?) would suggest that many people did not feel endangermented (endangermentified? Endangermenticated?) when they took a look out the window (as the late meteorologist Patrick Michaels often told people to do) and did not see the dread climate bogeyman.

Greenhouse gases are not like smog, which was so undeniably visible that a joke back in the day was, “I’m uncomfortable outside of LA, because I don’t trust air I can’t see.” The smog in the San Fernando Valley when I was a teen was so thick, it literally masked the ring of mountains around the city. We used to joke that the smog was actually a smoke-screen put up by Hollywood so people wouldn’t see them scrubbing off the scenic backdrops. Greenhouse gases are not like that.

The confidence that this Ah-hah! moment would happen was the enabling belief that let me keep fighting the same idiotic policy battles (EV mandates!) year after year, since 1995. I always believed, and told people that one day, as in a restaurant, the people of the US are going to be handed a bill for their climate-policy meal, and they’d look at it and say, “This is bullshit, I’m not paying this,” and it would be game over.

EPA’s endangerment finding was that moment. They were literally saying, “who are you going to believe, us, or your lying eyes?” That was the shark. Jumped. The climate-café bill come due. We now see the answer to that question as EPA’s endangerment finding goes extinct, and other programs (EVs, finally!) join them in the fossil middens of dead public policies. A long overdue awakening, but better late than never.

There is, of course, also a cautionary tale to be learned here by the MAGA/MAHA folks, some of which are pushing equally junky science to support equally junky policy. Food Coloring Phobics and High Fructose Corn Syrup Jihadis, take note. At some point, people will see the bovine excrement being pushed in the name of “public health,” and call it out. And vote for less of it. Eventually.

Quick disclaimer: I’m not a “climate denier,” by the way. There is actually some real, hard climate/atmospheric chemistry, and there is some reason to think that adding infrared-absorbing chemicals to the atmosphere (like GHGs) will cause some degree of warming of he atmosphere, transient or lasting, and consequently causing some changes to the climate and weather here or there. And before you pooh-pooh that chemistry, it is why now, most of the time, you can see the mountains around LA. But unlike the progression of knowledge about conventional air pollution, knowledge about the climate beyond that point is, IMHO, nearly nonexistent: it’s almost pure computer-model speculation. Policy based on that modeled bullshit is even worse. So, while I don’t think climate change is a “hoax,” or a “myth,” or whatever, I do think it’s a massive exaggeration, a mountain of threat conjured from a molehill of knowledge, and most proponents of coercive public policies based on that bullshit are malicious, malevolent, deceptive, and basically nasty people who probably hate Sydney Sweeney. That’s been my position since I studied the issue in depth in my doctoral studies, and though I’ve followed “the science” for 25 years since, I haven’t seen anything to change my basic position on the subject.

Steve adds—The media isn’t giving up its climate hysteria any time soon: