Trump Scraps CO2 Rule as Part of Tackling Climate Alarmism

Cows graze in a field near the coal-fueled Oak Grove Power Plant in Robertson County, Texas, on April 29, 2024. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Commentary

In what may well be the finest domestic policy achievement of the Trump administration, President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the rescission of the so-called endangerment finding on Feb. 12.

The 2009 endangerment finding (which wasn’t really a “finding” at all, but a political slogan that ignored sound science) held that carbon dioxide (CO2)—the basis of the human food chain (since CO2 is an essential nutrient of plant life, and plant life in turn sustains and nourishes animals and humans) and the gas that we celebrated when catalytic converters were added to automotive engines in the 1970s to convert toxic carbon monoxide to benign CO2—a vital, beneficial gas, was a potential threat to life on Earth due to an alleged possibility of human consumption of fossil fuels warming the global atmosphere to a harmful degree.

Finally, after decades of propaganda, cynical manipulations, and malevolent machinations on the part of the climate alarmist movement, Trump has liberated us from this malicious myth and paved the way for the removal of the anti-prosperity, hence anti-human, “green” policies that have waged war against affordable, reliable energy.

Climate alarmism has indeed been a scam, a hoax. Early whistleblowers in the scientific community were pointing out 35 years ago how federal funding flowed overwhelmingly to those scientists and universities willing to hop on board the climate alarmist train. Scientists repeatedly cited computer models as “proof” of the alarmist scenario, even though actual climate data conflict with the computer models.

In recent decades, billions upon billions of tax dollars were spent to advance a political agenda under the guise of “climate alarmism.” Billions more dollars were funneled to various green boondoggles in perhaps the most extensive corporate welfare/cronyism scheme in history.

The climate alarmism hoax was abetted by federal agencies tampering liberally with climate data. (See here and here and here and here.) Perhaps that is why the Senate has explicitly exempted any research and data collection or information analysis conducted by or for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the agency charged with monitoring climate change) from the Data Quality Act, a law that mandates sound science in policymaking.

All of this was going on even though scientific data showed that over the past half-billion years of Earth’s history, there has been no substantial correlation between global temperatures and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This was also obvious in recent history, for the warmest decade of the 20th century (the 1930s) had lower CO2 levels than the coolest decades (approximately the late 1940s through the late 1970s). In fact, at the very time in 2009 when the left was trying to pass a cap-and-trade scheme to tax CO2, its allies in the scientific community were backtracking—saying that well, yes, CO2 warms the atmosphere, but even though CO2 concentrations were rising strongly then, they thought that the atmosphere might cool for the next few decades.

Indeed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself has stated, it is impossible to make accurate climatic predictions because of the chaotic nature of climate. Humans will never be able to predict, much less control, the climate, but as I have written before, economic prosperity has greatly enhanced human survivability of Mother Nature’s mighty convulsions. Yes, the notion of human-caused global warming catastrophes has been a hoax—“the big green lie.”

The climate alarmism hustle has been, as Trump said, “ridiculous” from the start. The greenhouse effect (necessary to make our planet habitable) is not the control knob on Earth’s climate. Solar radiation, cosmic rays, ocean currents, volcanic (both terrestrial and submarine) activity, and cloud cover all affect Earth’s climate significantly. And even the greenhouse effect itself is not regulated by how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor, but if the messianic left (I call it that because it insists that it must have power in order to save life on Earth) had proposed regulating water usage, it would have been laughed off stage.

Climate alarmism was never about climate. It was all about power and money. The messianic left in our country has long craved total power. What better way to gain more control over American lives than to cite a hypothetical climate apocalypse? Then, our would-be “saviors” would (for our own good, of course) expand their power over our lives, such as by regulating the temperature setting in your house and imposing mileage limits on travel. And, of course, they would need to impose taxes on CO2 emissions—the mother of all taxes because of the ubiquity of energy consumption in our modern economy—thereby diverting ever more wealth (and the power that goes with it) from the private sector into the hands of the savior/overlord class.

The regulations spawned by the endangerment finding were indeed “disastrous,” as the president stated. I warned at the time that designating CO2 as a dangerous substance would open a veritable Pandora’s box of costly regulations, and it did. Limiting fossil fuel usage while subsidizing less efficient wind and solar energy has slowed economic activity, although thankfully, we are not in as desperate straits as the European nations that have gone more radically “green” than we have.

Indeed, according to a U.N. study more than a decade ago, the price tag for weaning the world from CO2-emitting fossil fuels was estimated at $552 trillion (that’s “trillion” with a “t”)—or in other words, about a decade’s worth of global gross domestic product, an inconceivably large economic disaster for human beings. And besides the heavy hit to economic growth, the government-mandated massive increase in “renewable” (intermittent) sources of energy also have their own pronounced negative environmental consequences.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your wisdom and clear vision in rescinding the pernicious endangerment finding. We need this return to sanity.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.