Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin on the Breitbart Fight Club said that the agency will review the agency’s endangerment finding — the “holy grail of the climate change religion” that has created over a trillion dollars in regulatory impact.
EPA Administrator Zeldin spoke during the Breitbart Fight Club Roundtable with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow and Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle about the efforts to unravel onerous regulations created by the agency.
Breitbart News Fight Club members asked Zeldin about the so-called endangerment finding, which created the legal basis for the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The finding stated that greenhouse gas emissions are an alleged threat to public health and welfare. The EPA has said that the endangerment finding has imposed trillions of dollars of costs on the American people.
“This is considered the holy grail of the climate change religion,” Zeldin remarked.
The endangerment finding arose from a 2007 Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled that the George W. Bush-era EPA erred in 2003 when it denied a petition to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles that the petitioners claimed caused climate change.
“Massachusetts held that the Clean Air Act’s general, Act-wide definition of ‘air pollutant’ was broad enough to include carbon dioxide. Massachusetts explicitly did not hold that EPA was required to regulate these emissions from these sources,” the EPA wrote.
The Zeldin EPA has said that Obama-Biden EPA took an “unorthodox” approach towards crafting the endangerment finding:
When the Court sent the matter back to EPA, the agency proceeded in an unorthodox manner. Slicing and dicing the language of the statute, it made an “endangerment finding” totally separate from any actual rulemaking-setting standards for emissions from cars. EPA argued it had the authority to do this because Congress didn’t specifically forbid it from taking this approach. By taking this approach, the endangerment finding intentionally ignored costs of regulations that EPA knew would follow from the finding — and indeed ignored any other policy impacts of those regulations.
The finding also took an unorthodox approach with the alleged “pollutant” at issue. It focused not solely on carbon dioxide, but on a mix of six gases — some of which cars don’t even emit. Contrary to popular belief, the finding never makes a straight-line conclusion that carbon dioxide from new motor vehicle engines is causing endangerment. Instead, it looked at this mix of six gases, from all sources over the world, and used multiple mental leaps to determine that this mix contributed, not caused, an unknown amount above zero to climate change, and that climate change contributed, not caused, an unknown amount above zero of endangerment to public health. Then, the finding looked at U.S. vehicle emissions — the only thing this section of the Clean Air Act actually authorizes EPA to regulate — and said that they were a big enough piece of the pie (some 4 percent of global emissions) to be “causing or contributing” to the mix of six gases — not to the endangerment itself. [Emphasis added]
Zeldin said that now is an appropriate time to review the endangerment finding, explaining, “That’s what I’ve been told, that we can’t look at it, we can’t touch it, we can’t talk about it. We don’t buy into that. We don’t believe that. We actually think that it’s good for us to have this conversation.”
“What the endangerment finding found was that carbon dioxide, when mixed with five other well mixed gasses, which they call greenhouse gasses, that those six greenhouse gasses, some of them, by the way are not even emitted by vehicles, that they contribute to climate change. Not that they cause climate change, they say contribute to climate change. How much? They don’t say, but it’s more than zero. And then they say, this is the endangerment funding, they say that climate change endangers public health.” Zeldin continued.
“They don’t say carbon dioxide equals pollutant. They don’t say carbon dioxide equals endangerment to public health,” he added.
Zeldin said that the endangerment finding has been the source of countless Obama and Biden-era regulations.
He elaborated, “They’ve used the endangerment finding to create all sorts of new rules during the Obama administration and during the Biden administration, we’re going to go back all the way back. We’re not going to just look at all these rules since then. We’re going back to the 2009 endangerment finding. It’s time for us to have this this conversation. They didn’t consider their rules that were going to be passed after they didn’t factor in innovation. They didn’t factor in a lot of science, obviously, since they didn’t predict it well enough afterwards. And it’s it’s something for us, it’s important for us to do our due diligence.”
For instance, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, said that the EPA regulations that arose from the endangerment finding have contributed to automobile prices to rise from $23,000 in 2009 to nearly $50,000 now.
The EPA has relied on the endangerment finding for seven vehicle regulations that reportedly have an aggregate cost of more than one trillion dollars, according to the agency’s own regulatory impact analyses. It has also been cited for many other regulations beyond automobiles.
Zeldin touted the Breitbart Fight Club, saying, “The rule about Breitbart Fight Club is that everyone needs to talk about Breitbart Fight Club. So, for all the Breitbart listeners out there who are tuning in, make sure you spread the word. Because I know I’ve been following what you guys are doing here, and I think this audience is only going to continue to grow, bringing the government to the people tonight. It’s an honor to be here with both you guys.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
