President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin formally announced the rescission of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases Thursday, a move that was immediately met by a hail of criticism from climate activists and their enablers in the legacy media. But, as the President pointed out during the press conference, that Obama-era finding “had no basis whatsoever in the law,” and thus had to go.
That Endangerment Finding came about via a series of perversions of the U.S. legal system that began more than 40 years ago, the results of which the Trump administration is now systematically unwinding. In an interview with CBS News following Thursday’s press conference, Zeldin specifically referred to “the Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright” as one of the key events that led to the rescission. That July 2024 decision in a case styled Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo revoked a perversion of the legal system from 1984 referred to as the Chevron Deference, a doctrine that for 40 years forced federal courts to defer to the judgments of regulatory agencies when they interpret their own authority under federal statutes.
As I pointed out here when that decision was rendered, unelected bureaucrats eager to expand the scope of their political powers have too often rendered interpretations that were in no way reasonable, and that fall far outside the original intent of Congress. That was what happened in 2009, when EPA’s bureaucrats made what Zeldin called “all sorts of mental leaps” to define carbon dioxide, i.e., plant food, as a pollutant under the provisions of the Clean Air Act to justify their Endangerment Finding.
In doing so, Obama’s EPA referenced the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in the case styled Massachusetts v. EPA as its empowering authority. But that decision was rendered by a different court with a liberal majority at a time when the Chevron Deference was in full force.
It was all a perversion of the law from the beginning – not about science, not about the law, but about pure, raw politics. In the U.S. legal system, one perversion of the law inevitably leads to another.
But that principle also works in reverse.
Now, we see those perversions being systematically unraveled by both the Supreme Court and the Trump Administration, and it’s all being accomplished not via executive orders but through major court decisions and the more permanent formal regulatory process governed by the Administrative Procedures Act. Doing it this way will make it much, much harder for any future Democratic administration to undo what Trump and Zeldin have accomplished here.
Thursday’s rescission was predictably met with howls of hysteria from the climate alarm community. ABC News anchor David Muir opened his evening newscast by reciting talking points from the alarmist lobby claiming, “President Trump has repealed U.S. power to regulate climate in this country. The President officially rejecting the science. … this is not only dangerous for the environment but for your health.”
Oh, the humanity! Chill, David.
New York Times climate writer Zeke Housfather didn’t do much better with his post on X, saying, “The scientific understanding of human-driven climate change is much stronger today than it was in 2009 when the EPA first issued the endangerment finding. There is no scientific basis for the Trump administration’s decision to repeal it.”
All the blather about “human-driven climate change” is wholly irrelevant, and Mr. Housfather seems to not understand that America is governed by a Constitution, not some peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature. The only “science” that matters here is whether plant food can be defined as a “pollutant” under the terms of the Clean Air Act. It’s a laughable absurdity on its face.
All of it, every bit of it, was based on a series of legal perversions: First, the Chevron Deference, then Massachusetts v. EPA based on the Chevron Deference, followed finally by the Endangerment Finding using the first two perversions as its foundation.
It all amounted to the most perverse three-legged stool in U.S. judicial and regulatory history. Once the first leg of that stool – the Chevron Deference – was undone, the entire thing was doomed to collapse. And so, it did. Thank you, President Trump and Administrator Zeldin.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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