Trump Administration Seeks to "Unfind" Politically Inconvenient Science
The EPA proposes to rescind scientific finding around the danger of motor pollutants, to the detriment of literally everybody
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Early last month, the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its proposal to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding, despite no new evidence contradicting the scientific conclusion. The finding allows regulation of climate change-causing emissions, and because Trump and his admin do not believe in climate change, they seek to delete any laws or regulations around it.
The 2009 finding interpreted part of the Clean Air Act (CAA) as giving the EPA the authority to regulate emissions from motor vehicles for the part they played in causing global climate change. Cars and trucks emit quite a few things from their tailpipes, many of which we all immediately understand to be harmful to human health and the environment.
A portion of these emissions hurt not only locally but also globally as they float up into the higher strata of the atmosphere. Gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, N2 O, and HFCs do not simply disappear into the air after they drift out of an internal combustion engine vehicle. They add to the other greenhouse gases (GHGs) already in the atmosphere and amplify their warming effect.1
Because this warming and the associated global climate change it causes have a negative effect on American health and welfare (through worse crop yields, more deaths from heat waves, less water access, coastal erosion and sea level rise, disruption of natural ecosystems, higher prices of goods and insurance, disaster-related migration, etc.), the EPA found that the Clean Air Act allows it to regulate the emissions that cause the warming. The CAA allows regulation of air pollution, and global GHGs certainly qualify.
Except now they don’t. Trump’s EPA, directed by Lee Zeldin, is attempting to say that GHGs are not a real cause for concern or merited to be regulated as air pollution. The proposal is, unsurprisingly, filled with and based on falsehoods. Part of the justification to rescind the finding is that emissions from American vehicles have too small of an impact on global GHG levels; it’s other people causing the pollution: “…global GHG concentrations in the upper atmosphere have continued to rise, driven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources.” Considering that the United States is the second largest emitter of GHGs on the planet, and that transportation is our largest single source of GHGs, this is a lie.
In the EPA’s press release, Zeldin says that “the Trump EPA is proposing to end sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers” which is also anything but true. The rescission, found on unjustifiable grounds, will generate more uncertainty, not less.
Going forward with this unfinding would “create a very significant amount of legal uncertainty for companies that generate GHGs and for insurance companies that try to insure those risks,” said Ken Alex, Director of Project Climate, part of the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s less support for this from industries that you might expect to support it. They’re not so unhappy with the fairly modest regulations that the federal government has issued on GHGs.”
The current regulations on emissions and vehicles are, despite what Zeldin claims, not at all extreme. The US still lags behind Europe in fuel economy, and if Americans were really concerned with how much their tailpipe emissions are being regulated, the nation’s bestselling vehicle for 50 years wouldn’t be the 10-20mpg F-150.
As Alex noted, American industry is not sweating bullets about current regulations. Green-minded environmentalists have not been a dominant force in American politics essentially ever, so what regulations we do have are not that onerous. And because the existing environment isn’t too bad for environmental polluters, they fear the ambiguous regulatory destruction that is the M.O. of the Trump admin.
If the EPA is successful in cutting off its own regulatory arms, it could actually cause greater regulations to be placed on these emissions, in some cases. The US is a federalized country. That means that the federal/national government’s actions and dictates generally supersede any state actions. If the federal government legalizes gay marraige, for instance, states cannot make or keep it illegal. But this also means that if the federal government backs away from something, like regulating GHGs, then states have room to step in, and industry cannot appeal to federal rules to preempt or block state rules. This has been the situation when it comes to GHGs and more environmentally concerned states like California.
According to Alex, “if the Clean Air Act does not cover GHG emissions, then there’s pretty good legal argument that the states can regulate that without reference to being preempted by the CAA.” Considering the Trump admin has recently moved to revoke a waiver that allowed California to set its own vehicle emission standards within the current paradigm, an end to federal involvement will all but guarantee that California and other states introduce stricter standards.
This means that carmakers and GHG-producing industry will have a patchwork of different regulations to follow within the US. And this is even worse for any company trying to sell or compete globally (all of them). “China is well ahead of us on electric vehicles, and the European Union has all kinds of rules that are going to continue to go into effect about what can be sold in terms of cars and GHGs,” Alex said. “So, even with this change, it’s not like it’s suddenly a great outcome for auto companies because they have to compete worldwide.”
The potential recission does not help the American public because it ostensibly makes it easier to pollute our local and global environments, in addition to eroding of shared descriptive reality by “unfinding” a scientific conclusion. It looks like it will hurt our industries by introducing more uncertainty and likely not producing any actual benefits; if car companies are going to compete in all states or the global market, they are likely going to build cars that pass the strictest regulatory environments, which means the cars are going to be built according to the more efficient standards. And it even appears that this will damage our national capabilities. Alex summarized the effects on the US by saying, “…again, it’s unclear how this plays out. I think it means things will move more slowly in terms of new technology in the US and that it will put our industries behind in the race with China and others in terms of developing new technologies.”
So, the Trump admin is not generating material benefit from its attack on science and its disbelief in the reality of climate change. Rather, it’s harming the populace and industry and nation for, uh, I guess “owning the libs”?
The proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding is not yet confirmed. Part of the process is that the EPA has to solicit public comment for 90 days. So, if you think this decision is corrupt, idiotic, short-sighted, without benefit, corrosive, low-IQ, or anything of the sort, please submit a comment here.
At the end of our interview, Alex confirmed the worry that this might cause an increase in US emissions, which seems like the goal of the action to me. But he noted that above all, this recission is chiefly entropic. “It’s not necessarily clear where this will head, other than it will be quite uncertain.”
GHGs trap heat from the Sun in the Earth’s atmosphere. Sunlight comes in from space, some of it bounces off the Earth’s surface and heads back to space, but then GHGs block some of the energy that is leaving (specifically the infrared-level energy). This makes the Earth warmer. Some GHG = good to keep the Earth from being icy. Pumping huge amounts of extra GHG into the atmosphere for the past 200 years like we have been doing = bad because it makes the Earth get hotter reeeeally fast.