The Return of a Familiar Apocalypse

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

Donald Trump has just announced that the Environmental Protection Agency has repealed the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. The so-called endangerment finding had given the EPA the ability to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and methane—two gases that are naturally present in the atmosphere—as if they were pollutants.

 

I’m very excited about this reversal. No, not because it’s a great deregulation achievement and a step in the direction of sanity. I’m just happy that the media will be moving off the hysteria over AI Armageddon and on to an old, familiar end-of-the-world panic for a few weeks. The AI dystopia stories packed a punch and had me genuinely unnerved. A little climate change catastrophizing will provide some temporary comic relief.

 

The fun has already begun. The New York Times, for example, reports that the Environmental Defense Fund said that repealing the finding “could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.”

 

I’m not laughing at death and asthma. What’s funny is that climate change has yet to be listed as “cause of death” on anyone’s death certificate or autopsy. People certainly get sick and die because of extreme weather conditions. But that’s been happening since the dawn of man, and it happens a whole lot less in the postindustrial age than it did centuries ago. Let’s say, for the moment, that climate change is real. You’ve still got a lot of work ahead of you if you want to prove that it’s killed anyone.

 

And what’s funny is the idea that someone thinks he can predict the number of asthma attacks and deaths 20 years into the future, whatever the cause. Seems to me that a sudden breakthrough in asthma treatment—maybe even a cure—would undo such projections. Again, supposing that climate change is real—an infinite number of factors are bound to affect the death toll in the next two decades: scientific advances, technological innovations, migration patterns, pandemics, wars, birthrates, anomalous weather patterns, and so on. And let’s add to that list future emissions from China—the largest polluter on the planet. The fate of mankind doesn’t hang solely on the status of the EPA’s ability to regulate.

 

Ultimately, what’s funny is that the science of modeling climate change has yet to prove that the phenomenon exists as claimed or is a threat to humanity. And a published record of predicted climate catastrophes that never came to pass would run longer than the Epstein files.

 

Barack Obama famously said that climate science was settled. In truth, the science fluctuates in perfect tandem with the weather itself. Two years ago, the Times published an article under the headline “Weirdly Warm Winter Has Climate Fingerprints All Over It, Study Says.” A month ago, the paper ran an article about this year’s dramatically cold winter. It’s headline: “What’s Up With This Big Freeze? Some Scientists See Climate Change Link.” Because that’s all they ever see, regardless of the actual climate.

 

So, I’ll enjoy the latest round of climate mania for as long as it lasts. Compared to stewing in AI doom, this feels like coming back home.