It was anything but fire and brimstone, just the slow, predictable unraveling of yet another regulation that never learned from the chaos it created.
The Trump administration recently announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially ditched the 2009 “endangerment finding” that for two decades has been referred to as the Holy Grail of the climate change cult. Greenhouse gases are no longer a menace to humanity. In government terms, the agency is admitting it has been chasing its own tail for years and finally decided to stop the spin.
This grand “finding” managed to unleash trillions of dollars into regulations that squeezed whole sectors of the U.S. economy like a boa constrictor on a crash diet. Moreover, Washington shoveled hundreds of billions into green energy projects that were about as were about as ready for prime time as a unicycle ridden by a tax auditor juggling flaming spreadsheets.
The so‑called endangerment finding empowered the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide and methane two gases that the Earth’s atmosphere has been exhaling since the dawn of time as if they were renegade pollutants sneaking across state lines. It was the foundation for federal regulation weaponization of carbon emissions from vehicles, power plants and major industries. Its repeal effectively removes the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
For nearly two decades, America has made a fundamental mistake of treating carbon dioxide, the breath of every living creature and the lifeblood of every plant as if it were poison.
The science has yet to prove the apocalypse the political left keeps breathlessly promising. It did produce enough hot air predictions of impending world peril to make the Epstein files look like a leaflet.
The decision followed a marathon review: 52 days of public comments, four days of virtual hearings featuring more than 600 speakers and a staggering 572,000 submissions weighing in on the rule.
This deregulation will dramatically reshape American climate policy by eliminating federal emissions standards and making it far more difficult for future administrations to reinstate them without proven evidence and detailed debate.
The overreaction from environmentalists was predictable and swift with the most outrageous coming out of The Environmental Defense Fund saying the repeal “could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.”
The thing about the word “could” is that dismisses scientific breakthroughs, shifting populations, and the rest of humankind especially the leading world’s polluter – China.
Climate change has yet to snag a starring role or even a cameo on anyone’s death certificate to include that bureaucratic purgatory where coroners quietly file the causes politicians are dying to blame but no one with a medical license will touch without a lawyer present.
Human destiny does not hang exclusively on EPA regulations.
America will survive the fall of one more overbuilt regulation. What we can’t survive is the superstition that every shift in temperature is a summons to remake the entire economy. The repeal doesn’t guarantee wisdom in future policy, but it does mark a rare moment when Washington stopped hyperventilating long enough to admit that fear is not a governing philosophy.
The climate will keep changing, the politicians will keep posturing and America will move forward not because of bureaucratic prophecy, but because its people are far more resilient than the regulations written in their name.
