On Aug. 5, Professor and EELP Founding Director Jody Freeman’s article, Trump’s EPA Proposes to End the U.S. Fight Against Climate Change, appeared in the Los Angeles Times. She details the administration’s attack on the legal and scientific basis of the endangerment finding.
First, it claims that greenhouse gases are not pollutants because they have global, not local, effects. This argument is hard to square with the Supreme Court’s ruling to the contrary, but they are trying it anyway.
The proposal also asserts that U.S. emissions don’t contribute to harms from climate change because climate impacts are too remote and American emissions are too small a share of the global total to matter.
The first point demands a direct link between U.S. emissions and specific climate impacts, which is impossible to prove given that the effects of climate change are the result of global pollution from numerous sources. The second point rests on a contrived method for calculating emissions piecemeal, which makes them appear vanishingly small. No category of sources, whether cars or power plants, would produce a large enough share of greenhouse gases to justify regulation under this approach. It’s a test designed to be impossible to pass.
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times.