EPA ends catastrophic plan to greenhouse gases

Nineteen years ago, at the end of the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the government’s inaction on climate change. The plaintiff in the case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, ruled that the Clean Air Act forced the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to the public and, if so, regulate them. The court essentially agreed in a 5-4 ruling. The ruling, a professor at Harvard Law School, caused what people called a “hazardous discovery” in 2009, which has formed the basis for federal restrictions on carbon pollution since then.

Now, the Trump administration wants to overturn the court’s ruling, or simply violate it. Last week, it announced a plan to remove hazard discoveries. Consistent with Congressional Republicans, the White House has wasted dozens of plans aimed at limiting climate change. These include costs for methane leakage, tax credits for clean energy development, and grants for installing electric vehicle charging stations for the state. (Recently, a federal district magistrate in Seattle ordered payments to charging station grants granted to several states, although it is unclear whether the money has been released.

“If finalized, the proposal would be the largest relaxed adjustment action in U.S. history,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said in a speech at a truck dealership in Indianapolis last week. The abolition (if finalized, given that court inevitable litigation is also an inevitable lawsuit) would be invalidated several Biden-era regulations aimed at reducing vehicle and power plant emissions. (The government has also taken separate actions to pursue these regulations.) More importantly, without new Congress legislation, this could make it impossible for future governments to try to curb emissions.

Michael Gerrard, a law teacher at the Sabin Climate Change Center in Colombia, told me: “I think the goal is to make climate regulation disruption beyond Trump.” If the administration’s argument prevails, he added: “The EPA will have a hard time using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. So they’re trying to permanently evacuate it, not for the next three and a half years.”

The obvious beneficiary of EPA’s latest move is the fossil fuel industry, which is Donald Trumpit seems almost got what it asked for, and then got some. According to the White House, its recent trade deal with the EU includes EU commitments that purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil and liquefied natural gas from the United States a few weeks ago, and oil and gas companies have received new or expanded tax benefits, estimated at $1.8 billion in a large “beautiful bill” approved by Congress. “The final bill is positive for all our focus for us,” said Aaron Padilla, vice president of corporate policy at the American Petroleum Institute. Tell this era. “We are becoming petrochemicals,” said Gerrard.

Attempts to cancel dangerous discoveries combine the orgy of the fossil fuel industry with another government favorite activity: camouflage science. The EPA relied heavily on a report in its proposal to repeal the discovery released last Tuesday and made public on the same day that the Department of Energy had commissioned from a few scientists’ explicit choice of its counter-trend view. A one hundred inch per page assessment reduces the dangers of climate change, sometimes seemingly contradictory by the numbers of the document itself. Several climate scientists quoted in the U.S. Department of Energy report said their conclusions were false. One, Zeke Hausfather, Tell wired In his opinion, the assessment does not seem like a formal document, but rather “a blog post, a scattered, frequent skeptic claim, a study conducted from the context or a critical example of the case that does not represent the broader results of climate science research.” In a comment on the website realclimate.org, Christopher O’Dell, a senior research scientist at the Collaborative Institute of the Colorado State University Institute of Atmospheric Research, a senior research scientist at the Colorado State University Institute of Atmospheric Research, Famous The report attributed to his paper being actually written by a completely different set of authors, suggesting that the document was made up with the help of AI

At this point, it is impossible to abolish hazard findings based on scientific reasons: against the claim of the DOE report, evidence since 2009 that climate change represents a threat to public welfare has become even more overwhelmed. (It is worth noting that on the day the report and EPA proposal were released, more than 10 million Americans were extremely rare extreme warnings from the National Weather Service).

“Re-examining science is a rash argument,” said Harvard law professor Lazarus. However, he observed that the government’s legal arguments were about how exactly the relevant parts of the Clean Air Act could be attracted to the current Supreme Court. Of the five officials in Massachusetts v. EPA, none of them were on the court, but three dissidents – John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas-Lehman. Meanwhile, three new judges in the court – Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett were appointed by Trump.

“They have some arguments that hostile courts may bite people,” Lazarus said. “My guess is that their goal here is not to have the court say there is no danger, but to have the court say there is reason to re-examine the hazardous hazard discovery.” “There won’t be a re-examination, but that in itself is enough to break everything down.”

Almost the only active spin outside the abolition Magazine The world may think that it may have unintended consequences for the fossil fuel industry. On the website dialoguePatrick Parenteau, Emeritus Professor of Law and Graduate School of Vermont, Famous Many cities and states have filed climate-related lawsuits against major oil companies. According to parents, the “strongest argument in the industry” is the claim to these lawsuits, namely “stolen by federal law,” the Clean Air Act. However, if the government believes that the Clean Air Act does not allow EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the PreMaption argument will lose its teeth. Parenteau noted that removing hazard discovery may be “fitting the fossil fuel industry.”

However, other legal scholars are also skeptical. They noted that litigation in states and cities will eventually reach the hostile Supreme Court as well. “It’s a good argument in theory,” Lazarus said. “But people can’t help but worry.” ♦