As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders - the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” - directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”
Since the EF is the foundation underlying all the Biden-era regulations restricting and suppressing fossil fuels, you can be sure that any attempt to eliminate it will be met with a full-bore litigation attack from the forces of the crazy left. Can the EF really be rescinded in a way that will stand up to these attacks?
Absolutely, it can. Let me address a few of the issues.
Massachusetts v. EPA
This is the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision that held that EPA was required to make a determination as to the status of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Here is a link to the Supreme Court’s opinion. Some commenters have suggested that Mass v. EPA must be reversed before the EF can be undone.
I disagree. I’m not saying that Mass v. EPA is a model of clarity, and there is some language in it that would suggest the opposite. However, I think that the language at the very end of Justice Stevens’s majority opinion is the holding:
We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding, or whether policy concerns can inform EPA’s actions in the event that it makes such a finding...We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute.
Thus Mass v. EPA did not determine that CO2 was a “pollutant” as defined in Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, but only directed EPA to determine whether it was or was not. Thus a new well-reasoned determination by EPA that CO2 and the other GHGs are not pollutants would not violate that case.
West Virginia v. EPA
The other important Supreme Court decision bearing on the EF is West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 decision where the Supreme Court held that EPA’s Clean Power Plan was beyond its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. The basis for the Court’s decision was what it called the Major Questions Doctrine, by which it held that a “transformative expansion” of EPA’s regulatory power would require a clear direction from Congress, which had not been given.
In 2024, despite West Virginia v. EPA, and without any further clear direction from Congress, EPA went ahead and finalized two gigantic new regulations to restrict use of fossil fuels, one regarding power plants and the other regarding automobiles. They essentially decided to dare the Supreme Court to try to stop them (much like Biden with his repeated efforts to forgive student loans).
West Virginia v. EPA did not explicitly overrule Massachusetts v. EPA, but the two are fundamentally in tension. The big difference is that the Court that decided Massachusetts v. EPA has since been largely transformed in personnel. Of the nine justices on the Court in 2007, only three remain - Roberts, Thomas and Alito - and all of them dissented in Mass v. EPA. The five justices in the majority plus Scalia have been replaced by three conservatives (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) and three liberals.
On today’s Court, I think it highly likely that a majority will uphold a well-reasoned rescission of the EF, and will not think it necessary to overrule Mass v. EPA.
Substance of the rescinding determination
Three main points need to be made in an EPA regulatory action rescinding the EF: (1) Empirical evidence accumulated since the original EF invalidates the finding and makes it impossible to conclude that CO2 and other GHGs constitute a “danger” as required by the statute; (2) due to huge increases since 2009 in CO2 and other GHG emissions outside the U.S. and thus outside the ability of EPA to regulate, no regulations promulgated by EPA could have any meaningful impact on the overall atmospheric concentrations of the gases, and (3) efforts by EPA to control the climate by restricting CO2 and other GHGs, by contrast, would almost certainly have drastic adverse effects on public health and welfare by, for example, destabilizing the electrical grid and causing blackouts, driving up the cost of electricity or mobility, bringing about massive battery fires and explosions, and lots of other such things.
Only the first of these three points deals with the “science” of whether GHGs do or do not cause any significant global warming. Most important is that this argument needs to be written carefully to not take on more than needs to be taken on. To rescind the EF, EPA does not need to contend that GHGs will not or cannot cause any global warming. Rather, they can put the burden of proof on the other side to show that GHGs emitted under EPA’s regulatory jurisdiction will inevitably cause dangerous warming. EPA need only conclude that there is no sufficient proof of that.
Framed in that way, this is not a complicated or difficult task. There are hundreds of scientific papers in the peer reviewed literature since 2009 accumulating empirical evidence that the dangers predicted 15 years ago have not happened. For example:
There have been no upward trends in hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, wild fires, or other dangerous weather events.
Sea level has not risen beyond the slow rate of rise over the prior century.
Sea ice has not declined as predicted. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have not meaningfully changed.
EPA can just create lists of dozens or hundreds of such scientific papers, and perhaps add a quote of a line or two from the abstract for each.
Points (2) and (3) are actually more important to the rescission than the point about the science of atmospheric warming. Trying to replace the fossil fuel energy system with something untried and untested actually does pose many real and immediate dangers - far more real, immediate, and dangerous than anything that might result from a hypothetical warming of a degree or two a hundred years from now. California is only up to about 30-40% of its electricity from wind and solar, and yet has suffered multiple instances of rolling blackouts. The extent of these blackouts has been relatively small only because California has the ability to import fossil-fuel- become lengthy and catastrophic. Similarly, batteries are proposed as the backup for intermittency of wind and solar generation. California and New York have both begun building massive battery farms to serve this role, although neither state has yet reached nearly 1% of the battery capacity they would need to back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system. But even with that small amount of batteries, both have suffered massive and explosive fires at their battery facilities. California had such a fire just last week at the facility known as Moss Landing in Monterey County. This was the fourth large fire at the Moss Landing facility over the past few years.
I actually have a high degree of confidence that a reconsideration of the EF will be successful. Likely, that will sweep away all of the restrictions on fossil fuels that have been put in place via regulation during the Biden years. One more thing: Once CO2 and GHGs are declared to no longer by “pollutants,” all of the billions of dollars of government grants under the Inflation Reduction Act to “reduce GHG pollution” can be suspended and never spent.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide: you can’t see, hear, smell or taste it. But it’s there - all around us - and it’s crucial for life. Composed of one carbon and two oxygen atoms, this simple molecule serves as the primary raw material out of which plants construct their tissues, which in turn provide the materials out of which animals construct theirs. Knowledge of the key life giving and life sustaining role played by carbon dioxide, or CO2, is so well established, in fact, that humans - and all the rest of the biosphere - are described in the most basic of terms as carbon-based lifeforms.
We simply could not and would not exist without it. Ironically, far too many demonize and falsely label this important atmospheric trace gas a pollutant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of being shunned like the plague, the ongoing rise in CO2 should be welcomed with open arms. Why? Because plants love CO2. Far from being a pollutant, this colorless, odorless, tasteless and invisible gas is better than the best fertilizer ever invented. Essentially, it is the “food” that sustains all plants on the face of the earth. And the more of it they “eat” (or take in from the air), the bigger and better they grow.
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Conversations That Matter
Dr. Patrick Moore takes issue with NGOs over climate, genetically modified organisms and the “truth” about carbon
He says we were literally running out of carbon before we started to pump it back into the atmosphere. “CO2 has been declining to where it is getting close to the end of plant life, and in another 1.8 million years, life would begin to die on planet Earth for lack of CO2.”
According to Moore, it is life itself that has been consuming carbon and storing it in carbonaceous rocks. He goes on to say, “Billions of tons of carbonaceous rock represent carbon dioxide pulled out of the atmosphere, and because the Earth has cooled over the millennia, nature is no longer putting CO2 into the atmosphere to offset this.”
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No sooner had fires erupted around Los Angeles than the vultures swooped hissing that it was climate change. Why, you might even get told “Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the Pyrocene”. And when it snowed in Florida, well, the Climate Adaptation Center went ‘How climate warming contributed to record snow in Florida’, to which Roger Pielke Jr. replied, “like clockwork”. And of course should it snow in LA, burn in Pensacola, flood in Kapuskasing or go dry in Managua, the little cuckoo will pop out and go “climate change” over and over as it always does.
The ravages of global heating in Pensacola, Florida Jan. 22, 2025 (courtesy of an alert reader who lives there)
One California news outlet admitted that “The snow comes during an exceptionally cold pattern for the south.” But then it insisted that:
“According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth’s global average temperature has been rising since about 1850. Human activity including the burning of fossil fuels is accelerating the pace of that warming beyond what would occur naturally… NOAA analyses show that ocean surface temperatures are rising faster than air temperatures. Warmer oceans can drive more intense evaporation and send more water vapor into the air for developing storms. More water vapor typically means heavy rain and snow rates.”
OK. So more snow despite that stuff about the end of winter. Got it. But in Florida?
Oh yes. You see:
“Of all regions on Earth’s surface, the Arctic is warming the fastest. This warming creates imbalances in the polar vortex, an area of powerful winds near the Arctic Circle.”
Oooh imbalances. It never used to happen, which we know because we don’t. But it must be so:
“When the polar vortex weakens, lobes of bitter, cold air can drop south and bring prolonged cold spells to the United States and other countries at the middle latitudes. This phenomenon led to the intense cold in the Eastern U.S. this week.”
No hesitation about causation. And then a fearless prediction that weather may happen:
“As climate change continues, snowstorms are still going to be part of the weather we experience. Shifts in moisture and temperature patterns will change where we see that snow and how much. Some regions could see significantly less snow in the long run as warming air favors more rain than snow. This is a concern for California, which relies on Sierra snowmelt as part of the state’s water supply. Changes in storm track patterns could also lead to relatively infrequent but unusually big snow events like what fell this week in the southern Gulf states.”
Could. Might. Unless it doesn’t.
Bloomberg wrote that:
“The region’s worst snowstorm in 130 years has seen as much as 10 inches pile up in New Orleans, according to public reports, smashing a record of 2.7 inches set in 1963. Temperatures fell to 26F (minus 3C) overnight. Similar accumulations of snow were recorded in Pensacola, Florida, and more than four inches hit the Houston area.”
And normally when you get a once-in-a-century event the media tell you it’s definitely proof that climate change has made it more frequent even with no data to support the claim. But in this case, crickets. Or not even those, given the temperature.
In fact often-loose talk of smashing records is appropriate here. As an AP story in the Winnipeg Free Press observed:
“Milton is just northeast of Pensacola, where 8.9 inches (22.6 centimeters) shattered the city’s previous all-time snow record of 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) set in 1895.”
As in nearly three times as much fell. So tell us the one about the end of winter again?
London, 28 January: The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has today published its periodic review of global hurricane activity. The review is based on the findings of key scientific bodies, comparing them to sensationalist news reporting and popular perceptions.
Trends in landfalling Atlantic/western Pacific hurricanes have been stable or decreasing since 1950.
There is also no global trend in overall hurricane frequency since reliable records began in the 1970s.
The apparent increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observation practices over the years, rather than an actual increase.
Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many storms were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
There is growing evidence that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement.
The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is linked to a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
The author, climate researcher Paul Homewood, said:
“The observational findings of meteorological agencies in 2024 once again confound those who claim to see a ‘climate crisis’ in the hurricane data. It is clear that we have not seen an increase in hurricane frequency, even though the public have been scared into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse.”
GWPF Director, Dr Benny Peiser, said:
“The gap between media hype, popular perceptions and the reality of empirical data is becoming ever more evident. This report sets out the facts and is a welcome corrective to misleading news coverage of hurricanes.”
Read the full paper here: The 2024 Hurricane Season (pdf)
NOAA has started tampering with their “RAW” temperature data, increasing all post-2007 temperatures. The graph below shows changes in the “RAW” maximum temperatures made over the past two years.
See the before and after images of the data here. Yes there is man made global warming but the men are at NOAA.
See animating before and after images at Tony Heller’s site here.
Weather Rant by Professor Art Horn, Meteorologist AMS
"The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction.” - Bertrand Russell 10/10/21
Published at theartofweather.net
Wednesday June 7th, 2023
There’s just too much going on not to talk about it. To quote Jack Klompus from Seinfeld “I’m sorry. I’m sitting here, the whole meeting, holding my tongue. I’ve known you a long time Morty, but I cannot hold it in any longer.”
I’m referring to the current situation of the Canadian wildfires and the resulting and persistent smoke issues down here in the United States. Under normal conditions a large very slow-moving storm rotating counterclockwise in the Canadian Maritimes would be circulating cool, dry, clean Canadian air into the New England. There is such a storm present in that location now. But with all these fires in Quebec Province the storm that is situated in the Maritimes is doing the opposite! The smoke from the fires is whirling around the storm and blowing into portions of New England.
Of course, predicably the media outlets are blaming climate change for the fires. But wildfires have always been part of nature’s balance between too much forest and too little. The “culling of the herd”, in this case old or weak trees, has historically been in part accomplished with what are called wildfires.
One of the most spectacular examples of this phenomena occurred on May 19th, 1780 during the revolutionary war. General George Washington noted in his diary that on that day darkness enveloped the sky. It was so dark during the morning that candles were lit to see their way about. People left their jobs and school children were sent home. Some prayed while others cried or went to taverns. Washington noted that the darkness varied and that the sun came out in the afternoon perhaps indicating that it was entirely hidden by the smoke in the morning.
Research indicates that the fires that caused the darkness were in the Algonquin Highlands of Ontario Canada. The meteorological conditions that brought the dense cloud of smoke to the region in 1780 is unknown but likely similar to what is happening now.
Today there are wildfires around the world every day just as there have been for millions of years. But today we have a new culprit of combustion that is not related to the doings of nature. I’m speaking of eco-terrorists. Nobody in the media seems to want to even suggest the idea that at least some of the current wildfires are the result of eco-terrorists. It’s not a far-fetched idea based on what’s been gong on around the world these days.
For instance, there’s the group “Just stop Oil” that’s made news with their adolescent, attention grabbing stunts of despoiling priceless works of art around the world. The group known as “Extinction Rebellion” and their antics such as holding protests in roadways to block traffic to call attention to their believe that climate change is going to end the world as we know it.
Another ultra-fringe climate change gang of bizarre individuals that calls themselves “Tyre Extinguishers” has claimed responsibility for deflating 100 sport utility vehicles in Copenhagen yesterday. They claim they are “defending themselves from climate change, air pollution and unsafe drivers. Gee, I guess climate change is so bad now that it causes unsafe drivers! They claim to have destroyed tires of people that own SUV’s in multiple countries. People have tried to reason with them but the negotiations fell flat!
The people that populate these extremist groups are, in my opinion hopeless malcontents. If it wasn’t climate change that they are fighting to stop, they would find some other cause to bring about their delusional mayhem.
Then we have the case of Audrey Elaine Dunham of Glendon Alberta. In court on February 15th, 2022 she was convicted on four counts of mischief against property in connection with multiple arson fires in the Bonnyville area of Alberta Canada. She actually admitted to setting 32 fires at the hearing! Apparently she was quite proud of her destruction. She was sentenced to 9 months in jail but amazingly she served no jail time.
Can I prove that at least some of these current fires have been deliberately set by eco-terrorists? No, not until someone claims responsibility or is arrested but it seems plausible to me.
Why would someone want to destroy forests that they claim they are trying to save? At least part of the answer is that by starting the fires and then blaming the cause on climate change they get the news coverage they couldn’t get any other way. The news media actually does the work for them since they are obsessed with climate change causing everything! Today every natural disaster they report about is now the result of climate change.
As a side note I saw yet another of the seemingly endless stories about sea ice loss in the Arctic. This story from the thedailybeast.com reports that another computer model study forecasts that after the year 2030 there will be no sea ice in the Arctic Ocean by the end of the summer.
Of course, one has to only go back to 2007 when there were similar predictions warning that by 2022 summer sea ice would be long gone from the Arctic. Another in the long line of climate change forecasts fails. Actually, sea ice data from the Danish Meteorological Institute reveals that as of today the amount of Arctic sea ice is within 75 percent of the 1981 to 2010 average for this time of year. Where are you going to see that in the news? Nowhere!
