Lee Zeldin’s EPA Rights an Environmental Wrong

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 13, 2025

 

Maybe they were dissatisfied with George W. Bush’s failure to endorse the climatological hysteria sweeping the Democratic Party. Maybe they were just annoyed that Al Gore and John Kerry lost. Either way, an expression of Massachusetts Democrats’ pique — the 2006 lawsuit they brought against the Environmental Protection Agency, which sought to force the agency to use the Clean Air Act as a backdoor means of regulating “greenhouse gases” — succeeded.

 

In 2007, the Supreme Court found that federal regulators could control carbon dioxide and other emissions that, in the justices’ estimation, were air pollutants. In addition, the Court determined that the Bush administration’s rationale for failing to do so was uncompelling. Still, Bush’s EPA dragged its feet. But when Barack Obama took office, his EPA issued a landmark regulatory framework — the 2009 “endangerment finding” — that has served as the basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources, from cars and trucks to oil and gas exploration to household appliances. Subsequent Democrat-led Congresses have sought to tailor the Clean Air Act to comport with Massachusetts v. EPA and the endangerment finding. It seemed as though the EPA’s audacious expansion of its regulatory authority would never be rolled back.

 

And yet, that’s precisely what the Trump administration set out to do, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is not lying down on the job.

 

“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” Zeldin wrote in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed. “As a result, the cost of living for American families will decrease, and essentials such as buying a car, heating your home, and operating a business will become more affordable. Our actions will also reignite American manufacturing, spreading economic benefits to communities.”

 

Climate activists are fit to be tied over the EPA’s decision to curtail its own regulatory authority — an act of infamy among proponents of a permanent bureaucracy insulated from the will of the voters — but Zeldin is not wholly focused on removing regulatory barriers to innovation and commerce. Zeldin’s maneuver helps restore a measure of sanity to U.S. policymaking that Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg found unconvincing.

 

In 2007, the liberal majority on that Court rejected the notion that the United States should not aggressively regulate greenhouse gas emissions because other nations were more aggressive contributors to this global problem, and hamstringing ourselves would do little to address the issue. In addition, the justices determined that the Clean Air Act was designed to be as “capacious” as possible so it would cover whatever environmental cause célèbre came down the pike. It was a classic attempt to impose not just public policy but ideology on the country from the Supreme Court bench.

 

The endangerment finding was just one misbegotten progeny of this decision, and Zeldin is amply justified in chipping away at its legacy.