EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin aired several half-truths and inaccurate claims on a right-wing podcast Tuesday about the 2009 endangerment finding, the scientific document that undergirds most U.S. climate rules.
His appearance on “Ruthless” came hours before he’s scheduled to announce the finding’s rollback, a move that he described as “a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Zeldin gave a glimpse of some of the legal and procedural arguments EPA is likely to offer for undoing the finding, which determined that human emissions of six heat-trapping gases drive warming that endangers public health and welfare. The finding has provided a legal basis for EPA rules on climate pollution from cars, power plants and energy development for 16 years.
He also teased claims the rollback effort might make about the state of climate science. Those assertions could be less likely to prevail in court but stand to be embraced by hard-right supporters of President Donald Trump.
Zeldin is expected to announce the rollback plan Tuesday afternoon at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, with another proposal to scrap Biden-era rules for tailpipe emissions that contribute to climate change.
Here is a fact check of Zeldin’s comments.
Zeldin took aim Tuesday at both the process and science that the Obama administration used to arrive at its finding nearly 16 years ago that greenhouse gases pose a public danger.
“They didn’t actually study carbon dioxide individually, and they made assumptions on the science that actually turned out not to be true,” Zeldin said on the podcast.
The endangerment finding that was finalized under then-Administrator Lisa Jackson was based on U.S. and global climate assessments through 2007. Those findings are now often considered to be conservative. Subsequent assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the global climate science body — and by U.S. government agencies have expressed greater levels of certainty about more serious and imminent climate risks.
The Obama-era finding considered all six “well-mixed” greenhouse gases together, in evaluating the risk they collectively pose to the public. That’s the same approach EPA has used to evaluate dangers from other classes of pollutants, like particulate pollution and volatile organic compounds that contribute to ozone depletion. Still, Tuesday’s proposal is expected to argue that EPA erred in not considering the six gases individually.
Zeldin also argued that the Obama administration didn’t follow the proper administrative process in finalizing the 2009 declaration.
“They didn’t go out for public comment, and they didn’t weigh the economic impacts of the regulations that would follow if they did the endangerment,” he said on the podcast.
The Obama administration did follow the Administrative Procedure Act, which establishes the process for government decisionmaking, when it wrote the finding. It issued a proposal in April 2009, followed by a 60-day public comment period. The responses to the comments that EPA received during that period remain on its website.
The endangerment finding is not a regulation, though it cleared the path for regulations. Historically, EPA has not weighed policy ramifications when determining that a new pollutant or set of pollutants endanger public health and welfare — the legal predicate for Clean Air Act regulations. But the questions about whether EPA should have weighed the costs and benefits of rules that followed from the 2009 finding are likely to pervade the agency’s new proposal.
On the podcast, Zeldin faulted the Obama-era EPA for not considering benefits from carbon dioxide emissions alongside costs. And he pledged that his EPA would “consider all the advancements in technology over the course of the last 20 years” and U.S. progress in reducing emissions over the last two decades.
EPA in 2009 did consider the benefits of heat-trapping emissions. The finding acknowledged short-term benefits to “certain crops” and to forestry from warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.
But it added that there “is significant uncertainty about whether this benefit will be achieved given the various potential adverse impacts of climate change on crop yield, such as the increasing risk of extreme weather events.”
Forestry benefits, it said, are “offset by the clear risk from the observed increases in wildfires, combined with risks from the spread of destructive pests and disease.”
The long-term effects of climate change on both sectors, the finding found, would be overwhelmingly negative.
Zeldin hinted Tuesday that the finding would make the case that the U.S. economy is decarbonizing on its own, downplaying the need for regulations. The Trump EPA did not release its most recent data for U.S. emissions this spring, and it has suspended a long-standing program that required major emitters to report their greenhouse gas output.
But the Environmental Defense Fund posted EPA’s inventory for 2023 emissions after obtaining it in May through a public records request. It showed that U.S. emissions had declined only 17 percent between 2005 and 2017, well short of what scientists say the world’s largest economy and second-largest annual emitter would need to do to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
