US EPA Embraces Climate Denial with Proposal to Revoke Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding
The move comes just weeks after catastrophic flooding – intensified by climate change – killed more than 130 people in Texas.
Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
Last month, LaKreesha Bates and her family went camping along the Comal River, a tributary of the Guadalupe River, in central Texas. It was the start of the Fourth of July weekend and they were planning to have a fun family vacation and enjoy recreating in the outdoors.
When they arrived at the campground, they experienced some scattered showers. After they pitched their tent and started to settle in, the showers turned into a downpour. “In that moment, I felt very uneasy. I felt like something wasn’t right, because the rain then became very constant and very heavy,” Bates recalled.
It was still raining when they woke up the next morning, on July 4. Nevertheless, Bates and her family decided to join several other families in going tubing on the river. But she could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. “I said to my husband, let’s just get off of the river,” she said in sharing her story during a recent press briefing. “It just doesn’t feel right.” They were just over a mile away from the Guadalupe River, which had risen 26 feet in 45 minutes resulting in catastrophic flash flooding. Bates said she received no emergency or evacuation notifications. “We really were oblivious to what had happened just miles up the river.”
The deluge continued that night and Bates recalled that she was grateful to have just gotten through the night in their soggy tent. The next morning, they immediately packed up and left.
“As far as we could tell, we were the only family that was packing up to leave, and there were several families out there. That has been my biggest concern, that we really did not receive any warnings. And we left without any type of evacuation or any type of notification from our campground,” Bates said.
Texas parents gathered outside the White House last month for a Texas flood victims memorial and press conference, with small chests representing the children who died during the catastrophic flooding. Credit: Bora Chung/Survival Media Agency
The central Texas flooding in early July resulted in over 130 fatalities, including at least 37 children. It was the country’s deadliest inland flash flooding disaster in decades, precipitated by extremely heavy rainfall from a storm system that gathered energy from the overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It is the kind of extreme weather event that is happening more often as the planet heats up.
In general, warmer air holds more moisture – that is basic physics. So as the atmosphere warms due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, primarily emitted from fossil fuel combustion, we can expect to see a lot more of these kinds of torrential rain events that cause devasting and, in some cases, deadly, flooding.
“This is climate change that we’re seeing in real time in these events,” Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with Climate Central, said during the press briefing.
“For us there is no doubt that burning fossil fuels has enhanced the precipitation associated with these floods,” said Davide Faranda, a scientist with a consortium called ClimaMeter, which has found that the meteorological conditions leading to the July Texas floods were amplified by human-caused climate change.
“There is, unfortunately in some countries like the US, no sign of stepping back from burning fossil fuels,” Faranda added. “And therefore, we can expect to have more of these natural disasters in the coming years if we don’t go towards renewable energy and stop emitting greenhouse gases.”
EPA “Has Broken with Reality”
And yet, the US government under the Trump administration is doing everything it can to double down on fossil fuels, stymie renewable energy development like wind and solar, and ensure that even more greenhouse gases (GHGs) are emitted. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now trying to undermine its own authority to regulate GHG emissions by rescinding the so-called endangerment finding that serves as the legal underpinning for EPA’s obligation to curb these planet-warming emissions.
On July 29, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin officially proposed revoking the finding the agency made in 2009 that GHGs endanger human health and welfare. This was a science-based determination, and the scientific record on climate change since then has only gotten more robust and indisputable.
But the Trump administration is apparently making an attempt to contest that climate science. As part of EPA’s proposal to revoke the GHG endangerment finding, the Department of Energy released a new report that questions the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions (and resulting climate change impacts) are harmful to human society and the natural environment. The report, titled “A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”, suggests that CO2-induced warming is “less damaging economically than commonly believed” and that aggressive mitigation strategies may be more detrimental than climate change itself. Many climate denialist messages that have been around for decades are reflected in the report, from the assertion that the science is too uncertain to justify policies to limit GHG emissions to the claim that elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are beneficial because they stimulate plant growth.
“The information that’s included in the report is just fundamentally inconsistent with all of the scientific evidence we have. So that undermines its credibility,” said Peter Zalzal, Associate Vice President for Clean Air Strategies at Environmental Defense Fund.
With this report and move to axe the endangerment finding, Trump’s EPA is fully embracing climate denial and is at odds with science, the law, and reality and common sense, environmental experts and advocates say.
“This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt,” said Joseph Goffman, former Assistant Administrator of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “By walking away from the Endangerment Finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality.”
“Lee Zeldin’s assertion that the EPA shouldn’t address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn’t fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd,” Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.
During Trump’s first term, EPA did consider the move to repeal the endangerment finding – which has survived all legal challenges so far – but it ultimately decided not to go down that road. Since then, the IPCC has issued its Sixth Assessment report and the US government has put out the Fifth National Climate Assessment, so the science is even more solid and unequivocal than during the first Trump administration. And more Americans are experiencing the impacts of climate change in their day-to-day lives, from extreme heat to catastrophic fires, floods, and storms.
“When millions of people are experiencing in their everyday lives the harms from climate-fueled fires, and floods, and heatwaves, and soaring insurance costs, I think it is beyond reckless for the Environmental Protection Agency to suggest that climate change, climate pollution, does not endanger our lives,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel at Environmental Defense Fund. “And then to turn to some climate denialists brought in by the Department of Energy to try to support that attack on live-saving safeguards, it is really putting millions of people in harm’s way.”
For LaKreesha Bates, who has experienced a climate change-fueled extreme weather disaster firsthand, ignoring the problem or downplaying its severity because of ideological persuasions is not acceptable.
“I just think we just need to stop playing politics with people’s lives,” she said.
“These disasters are coming more frequently, they’re coming heavier, they’re more dangerous, and they’re taking away human life.”