The New Neo

It was Nixon who established the EPA by an EO in December of 1970, later ratified by Congress. It seemed well-intentioned enough:

At its start, the EPA was primarily a technical assistance agency that set goals and standards. Soon, new acts and amendments passed by Congress gave the agency its regulatory authority. A major expansion of the Clean Air Act was approved in December 1970.

EPA staff recall that in the early days there was “an enormous sense of purpose and excitement” and the expectation that “there was this agency which was going to do something about a problem that clearly was on the minds of a lot of people in this country,” leading to tens of thousands of resumes from those eager to participate in the mighty effort to clean up America’s environment.

But power tends to corrupt, or at least grow and grow. From a WSJ editorial:

EPA [under the current Trump administration] is proposing to undo what Congress never gave the agency the authority to do: Regulate greenhouse gases. The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to regulate pollutants such as ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and others that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

A 5-4 Supreme Court majority ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) that greenhouse gases could qualify as pollutants under a capacious reading of the law. Ergo, the EPA must regulate them if it finds they endanger the public. Thus arose the Obama 2009 endangerment finding that undergirds federal climate diktats.

The finding acknowledged scientific uncertainties about the effect of CO2 emissions on temperatures, extreme weather, allergies, diseases and more. But it cherry-picked studies to support the dubious proposition that greenhouse gases pose a clear and present danger to the public.

The gist of it is the administration’s claim that CO2 is not a pollutant like the ones envisioned in the Clean Air Act:

Those pollutants “are subject to regulatory control because they cause local problems depending on concentrations that include nuisances (odor, visibility), damage to plants, and, at high enough exposure levels, toxicological effects in humans,” the report notes. “In contrast, CO2 is odorless, does not affect visibility and has no toxicological effects at ambient levels.”

In other words, higher levels of CO2 in the air from fossil fuels won’t make you sick. This is a distinction Democrats elide when they claim that increases in CO2 will cause dirtier air.

It matters because this expansion to CO2 was the way a host of regulations came to be: electric-vehicle mandates, the retirement of fossil-fuel fired power plants, and proposals to regulate CO2 emissions from such things as leaf blowers and lawn mowers which use fossil fuels.

Obviously, there are legal hurdles ahead.

NOTE: Here’s one of the comments to the article:

It too late anyway. The Republicans have won the extreme weather, inundated coastline, wildfire raged future they future they always wanted. Gee, I wonder why people aren’t lining up to have babies anymore? It is too dangerous and too expensive.