President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Lee Zeldin announced that they had repealed Obama’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, which found six greenhouse gases to be “dangerous.”
“Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers,” said Trump. “Prices went up incredibly for a worse product. This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. You’re going to get a better car. You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.”
Leslie summed up that finding on Wednesday, stressing the gases are life-sustaining:
The agency decided that six key greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, and others) endanger both public health and welfare, laying the groundwork for hyper-regulation that restricted both prosperity and personal liberty. Subsequent rules promulgated by the EPA allowed the agency to essentially wage a “War on Fossil Fuels,” a “War on Appliances,” and a “War on Meat.” Biden’s ludicrous “Inflation Reduction Act” further fueled this inanity by codifying the “Green New Deal.”
Leslie is not wrong. I don’t want an electric car. I don’t want to eat bugs. I don’t want to use unreliable energy.
I love my Toyota 4Runner. I love my steaks and bacon. I love regular light bulbs.
It’s bad enough that you have to flush twice with these new toilets and take twice as long to rinse dishes because of restricted water flow.
Anyway. Trump continued:
In 2009, Barack Hussein Obama, his EPA designated fossil fuels such as oil, gas and other things that actually make factories rock and roll and other things drive very nicely as a threat to health and human welfare. Known as the endangerment finding, this determination had no basis in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty and all over the world…and yet, this radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam, one of the greatest scams in history. Probably as great, maybe even greater than Russia, Russia, Russia, hoax, etc. which the Obama and Biden administration used to destroy. Countless jobs and the jobs have been just decimated…[I]t raised prices and caused immense harm to the U.S. Auto industry we thought irreparable, but we’ve got them back.
Zeldan said that the move “will save $1.3 trillion by removing the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal GHG emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions, and reporting obligations that exist solely to support the vehicle GHG regulatory regime.”
The mainstream media tries hard to disguise their opinion as fact in their questions and articles.
They fail bigly, just like Weijia Jiang from CBS, whose question allowed Trump to tout other successes:
CBS’s @Weijia Jiang on today’s EPA announcement: “What do you tell Americans who are concerned that the $1.3 trillion in savings does come at a cost to public health and the environment, based on science?”President Trump “I tell them, don’t worry about it, because it has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a giant scam. This was a rip off of the country by Obama and Biden, and let’s say Obama started it and got it rolling and a terrible rip off. They’ll have more money to spend for health care. You look at it now, they can go out and spend it on something that’s meaningful, and nobody’s doing more for health care than the Republican Party. And that starts with the fact that prescription drugs are going to be coming down at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. They’re falling. You know, we were paying the highest prices in the world by far, sometimes by ten times more than other countries. Now we’re going to be paying whatever the lowest price is anywhere in the world. We’re going to be paying that. It’s called favored nations, most favored nations. And I think it’s the biggest thing to happen in this world, the world of medicine, prescription drugs ever. There’s never been anything like it. You know, if, like, in my third year, first term, I actually got prices down one quarter or one eighth of a percent. And I was so proud of myself because they were like that for years and years. And since under Biden, they went up very, very substantially. And now they’re coming down by depending on, you could say 500, 600, 700 percent, or you could say 80 percent. It doesn’t matter.”
The headlines on some of the articles published online made me giggle:
The first four paragraphs in The New York Times:
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.
Oh, give me a break.
Their holier-than-thou schtick is nauseating enough, but it leads to actual vomit because we all know the repeal will end up in the courts.
After all, as Leslie pointed out, the Obama administration based its Endangerment Founding on the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA.
Zeldin claimed in his press release that the EPA reviewed “the legal foundation of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and the text of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in light of subsequent legal developments and court decisions.”
It sounds like the EPA would argue “that Section 202(a) of the CAA does not provide statutory authority for EPA to prescribe motor vehicle and engine emission standards in the manner previously utilized, including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations.”
Well, Section 202(a) states that the EPA could develop standards for motor vehicles and engines “which contribute to air pollution and which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
So while Trump and Zeldin boast about the removal and savings, it could be a long time before Americans see any changes.
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