Trump Has Golden Opportunity To Blow Up Climate Agenda’s Crown Jewel

The Trump administration is on the precipice of ending the Endangerment Finding, a rule that Democrats have used for years to impose harsh climate regulations, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Endangerment Finding, established in 2009 under the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rules that greenhouse gasses including carbon dioxide can be regulated for the sake of human health and the environment. The underlying science was contested when the EPA established the rule, and the Endangerment Finding has since been used to impose draconian rules on power plants that have helped lead to closures across the country and teed up Democrat policies that have forced electric vehicles and appliances onto consumers, energy sector experts told the DCNF.

“The Endangerment Finding was the result of a highly politicized process relying on cherry-picked data meant to appease the wants of climate extremists. It quickly became a favorite tool of Democrat administrations and their left-wing allies to manipulate the economy in favor of their politically-preferred technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles,” Mandy Gunasekara, author and former EPA Chief of Staff under the first Trump administration, told the DCNF. “The effects of the regulatory schemes built off of the Endangerment Finding are far-reaching and costly. The Endangerment Finding has led to higher energy costs, unreliable electricity grids, lost jobs and a shift of investment to overseas countries like China and India that have lackluster environmental standards.”

The EPA announced that the agency is formally reconsidering the Endangerment Finding on March 12 in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other agencies. OMB received a request from EPA on June 30 regarding the 2009 Endangerment Finding, though the contents have not yet been publicized.

“The proposal will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF.

In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts vs. EPA that greenhouse gases are air pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, setting the precedent enabling the Endangerment Finding two years later.

Stringent rules on power plants that stem from the Endangerment Finding have led to closures of coal facilities around the U.S. and weakened the electrical grid, spiking the risk of blackouts, experts have explained to the DCNF previously. After years of static electricity demand, the wave of power plant closures and the anticipation of new data centers has led to projections that the U.S. may be unable to meet its power needs in the near future, according to industry experts and a recent Department of Energy (DOE) report.

“We’re now at a point where we’re facing frequent blackouts… because there’s too much wind and solar in the system,” Myron Ebell, former director for the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and leader of the Trump EPA transition team in 2016, told the DCNF. Ebell explained that energy technology like coal provides baseload power, and a heavy reliance on intermittent sources like wind and solar tanks the reliability of the electrical grid. He also noted that there is a correlation between high electricity costs and a strong dependence on resources like wind and solar.

The Endangerment Finding has not only led to strict regulations that have ultimately weakened the electric grid, but it has also allowed for policies that police vehicle emissions, Ebell told the DNCF.

“The consequences of the Endangerment Finding are people being forced to buy vehicles they don’t want,” Ebell said, adding that the One Big Beautiful Bill act did a lot to aid consumer choice as it reduced the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard violation penalty to $0.

“Now automakers can go ahead and start producing the vehicles Americans want to buy,” Ebell said. He also noted that the Clean Air Act was not designed to regulate carbon dioxide, arguing that it does not do so effectively and that Massachusetts vs. EPA is not a solid legal ruling.

“It’s one of the really most incoherent and poorly argued Supreme Court decisions you can find,” Ebell told the DCNF. “The justices on the majority side really wanted to get on the global warming bandwagon, and they just didn’t want to miss out and be on the wrong side of history.”

Gunasekara argued that the scientific data chosen to justify the Endangerment Finding did not consider the benefits of carbon dioxide, and that the models predicting worst-case scenarios have been “disproven by what we’ve experienced in real life.” Some key scientific points were drawn from the fourth United Nations Climate Assessment, which is now almost 20 years old, Gunasekara pointed out, noting that the most recent report is the Sixth Assessment Report.

“The Trump Administration should make its decisions based on the latest and greatest science. The Endangerment Finding does not meet this standard and should no longer be used as a basis for ineffective, highly politicized regulations,” Gunasekara said.

Other critics in the energy sector agree that the Endangerment Finding was not decided on the best scientific evidence.

“The problem is they’ve taken the alarmism way out of proportion,” Willie Soon, astrophysicist and geoscientist who conducts research for the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES,) told the DNCF. He argues that the scientific evidence available in 2007 when Massachusetts vs. EPA was decided was “boldly untenable,” and that the EPA engaged in “deliberate cherry-picking.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, told the DCNF that though the data supporting the Endangerment Finding might have come from well-intentioned scientists, it is now outdated.

“It’s about time the Endangerment Finding was rolled back formally,” Furchtgott-Roth said, arguing that the EPA “already rolled back the Endangerment Finding de facto” in June’s proposed repeals and reforms of Obama- and Biden-era emissions rules on power plants.

If the EPA proposed a rule to roll back the whole Endangerment Finding, it would make its way through the federal rulemaking process. The proposed rule would be open to public comment for at least 30 days in the Federal Register before Zeldin could sign it, though significant or major rules are often required to have a 60-day implementation delay.

OMB did not respond to the DNCF’s request for comment.