Editors at National Review Online praise a recent change in federal government policy.
Which is the greater public menace: ubiquitous greenhouse gases or the contraction of economic liberty necessary to limit their emission? For over 15 years, the federal government chose to target the former at the seemingly limitless expense of the latter. But not anymore.
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would formally revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding from 2009 that the atmospheric concentrations of six greenhouse gases posed a danger to the public by exacerbating global warming. Under the Clean Air Act, which grants the EPA its authority to regulate air pollutants, this “Endangerment Finding” fulfilled the statutory requirement that the agency needed to issue manifold rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions from sources across the U.S. economy.
Most notably, the Endangerment Finding has been cited to justify ever-tightening standards for new vehicles’ carbon dioxide emissions — including the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate that it tried to sneak through the regulatory back door. Bureaucrats have been instructed to regulate major industries based on their alleged climate risks, aiming far beyond the toxic air pollutants that can directly harm people’s health.
Greenhouse gases, by contrast, are harmless for humans to inhale in normal concentrations. The EPA during the Obama administration asserted, however, that by trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere and gradually raising its temperature, the emission of these gases threatens the “public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
Regardless of how climate change will affect Americans’ health and welfare decades from now, the EPA’s finding was a gross mutilation of the Clean Air Act’s plain meaning, which allows only for the regulation of harmful air pollution. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, as a natural and eternal component of the atmosphere, by their nature cannot be considered air pollutants. Neither are such substances threatening, if the word has any limits to its meaning, as they do no injury to those who breathe them in.
