(CNN) — Lee Zeldin, a former Republican Congressman from New York and now the Trump Administration’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Sunday defended the Trump Administration’s move to repeal the so-called endangerment finding that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health.
“To reach the 2009 endangerment finding, they relied on the most pessimistic views of the science. The great news is that a lot of the pessimistic views of the science in 2009 that was being assumed ended up not panning out,” Zeldin said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety, which has served as EPA’s basis for many of its significant regulations aiming to protect the environment and decrease climate pollution. If successful, the repeal could strip away the federal government’s most powerful way to control the country’s planet-warming pollution and fight climate change.
The text of the administration’s proposal to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding said that while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise in the atmosphere, that rise has been “driven primarily by increased emissions from foreign sources,” and has happened “without producing the degree of adverse impacts to public health and welfare in the United States that the EPA anticipated in the 2009 Endangerment Finding.”
The US is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and historically has emitted more planet-warming pollution than any other country. Many rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have showed both climate pollution and its warming effects are not just harming public health but killing people outright.
In the nearly 16 years since the EPA first issued the Supreme Court-ordered endangerment finding, the world has warmed an additional 0.45 degrees Celsius (or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) to 1.4 degrees Celsius, according to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather.
“Both the scientific certainty around climate change and evidence of the dangers it is causing have grown stronger since 2009,” Hausfather said in an email. “There is no evidence that has emerged or been published in the scientific literature in the past 16 years that would in any way challenge the scientific basis of the 2009 endangerment finding.”
Pressed on whether he’s skeptical of the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are the overwhelming driver of man-made climate change, Zeldin said, “That might be your way to try to twist my words.”
The EPA is in a public comment period on its proposal to repeal all greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles, since they stem from the 2009 finding.
“We’re going through a public comment period. We want to make the right decision afterwards. But for people who want to sum up the 2009 endangerment finding as if they study carbon dioxide as an endangerment on human health, they did not do that,” Zeldin told CNN.
Asked whether the EPA should have a role in trying to combat climate change, Zeldin said that the Supreme Court “made it very clear that I have to follow the law.”
“I have to follow the plain language of the law, and I can’t get creative. So when you read through the 2009 endangerment finding, they say that where there’s silence in the law, there’s gaps that I should just be interpreting that as my own discretion. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that that is not what is a power that I have,” he said, adding that drawing up such a regulation should be left to Congress.
CNN’s Ella Nilsen and Andrew Freedman contributed to this report.
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