The latest climate alarmist nervous breakdown is over the US Environmental Protection Agency rescinding the tendentious 2009 “Endangerment Finding” that declared CO2 a direct threat to human health. The New York Times “Climate Forward” set the appropriate tone of solemn hysteria with “The Trump administration on Thursday erased the scientific finding that requires the government to regulate the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” The fact that the EPA explicitly declined to make a finding on the science, instead basing its decision on recent Supreme Court rulings, apparently eluded the NYT. Meanwhile the parent publication wrote the patent falsehood “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change”. The American government can do all kinds of things to “fight climate change” (if it really thinks the weather (a) can be frozen in place and (b) should be, under 2026 conditions, or 1926 or whenever it was allegedly just right) but only if Congress authorizes it, rather than over-zealous bureaucrats bestowing novel legal authority on themselves. What it should not do is twist the meaning of words to bypass the legislative process and its tedious requirement for public consent. But what fun is that?

Someone at the Times has got Ctrl-C Ctrl-V down pat, because the main story, after repeating the trope “the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being”, also said:

“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.”

Hmnnn. The party line sounds oddly familiar, even with “control” substituted for “regulate”. Carbon dioxide is “pollution”, it’s “dangerously heating the planet”, the finding was “scientific” and we are all going to die. Mind you, the finding never was that “climate change endangers human health” but that CO2 does, so they don’t have their fact-checking well in hand. (Like Heatmap emailing on Feb. 13 “Trump formally repeals the rule undergirding all federal climate policy” as if there were no such thing as laws, other agencies or other rules.) Of course they’re long past tolerating any dissent on the question whether CO2 causes climate change, so the weaker the evidence gets the shriller the rhetoric becomes.

Hence Scientific Communism blares:

“The Environmental Protection Agency scrapped the agency’s landmark 2009 global warming ‘endangerment finding,’ breaking with the long-standing scientific consensus that global warming poses a risk to human health.”

Not, you’ll notice, some specific amount or pace of warming. Nor do they deal with the “long-standing scientific consensus” that in fact cold still kills far more people than heat, even in warm places. Or that the planet has been greening spectacularly in the last 40 years. Who are you going to believe, your own data or the dictates of Big Scientist?

Speaking of party lines, figurative and literal, Bloomberg Green chants:

“The Trump administration is set to announce today that it’s rescinding the justification for a swath of climate regulations. In stark contrast, new data shows that China, the world’s largest polluter, has started to rein in carbon dioxide emissions.”

It adds that “unlike Trump’s first term, the latest changes may be harder to reverse and result in long-lasting impacts on public health and the economy.” How exactly one would measure those impacts on public health is a mystery, and why the economy would suffer from less regulation and more affordable, reliable energy is too. But they are long past discussing things.

For instance, that it was just an executive branch agency finding. And if liberals now horrified at how much discretionary power the executive branch has in the United States were more given to self-examination, they might reflect on who has spent over a century, not just since the New Deal but the late 19^th-century Progressive movement, trying to increase executive branch power and discretion on the theory that it would take the politics out of government and ensure that everything was always left-wing, aka “experts say.”

If it’s too much to ask, they could at least reflect on the fact that the United States government still has enormous power to do all kinds of things, through a quaint process called “legislation” in which people chosen by the citizenry to make rules about stuff get to make rules about stuff. Of course they generally have to be rules the actual “We the people” support to some significant extent, which could be a problem here.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized snidely:

“The scope of CO2 regulation is a decision for Congress. It’s richly ironic for Democrats who denounce Mr. Trump as an authoritarian to howl that he’s relinquishing power to regulate all corners of the economy under the guise of climate that the Biden and Obama administrations unilaterally claimed.”

But there’s no question that the American Leviathan could still take aggressive action on climate if enough people wanted it to. Or should be no question, though Heatmap seems as persuaded as the Times, in Heatmap’s case through an email pointing back to a July 2025 interview, that legislation isn’t a thing in democracies, just regulation. Technocracy not democracy or some such.

As for the actual legislative framework, Chris Martz observed (after regrettably indulging the trope that “Al Gore is a fraud” rather than someone deeply committed to a disintegrating theory), the problem for the Obama administration in 2009 was that:

“The Clean Air Act, as written, does not classify CO₂ and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHGs) as ‘air pollutants.’”

Now of course, as he adds, Congress could have amended it to do so. But bypassing such Constitutional minutiae as legislating and popular consent, instead:

“Obama decided to lean on the Chevron Deference (which no longer stands) to force the EPA to ‘find’ evidence that GHGs are a danger to public health.”

It’s really no way to make law, at least in a democracy. Which as David Blackmon chortles is a major reason why the “Chevron Deference” rule shielding executive fiat from judicial scrutiny was revoked by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024.

It gets worse, because another even stickier matter, requiring even more self-examination, is that the Obama-era finding in question was intellectual rubbish as well as constitutional jiggery-pokery. As Matthew Wielicki argues, it ignored at least three key scientific considerations: natural warming from the Little Ice Age, the net benefits of modest warming to humans and the global greening from more atmospheric CO2. It wasn’t arrived at scientifically because there was no effort to do it that way. It was arrived at bureaucratically, in order to justify policy decisions already taken on grounds that were anything but scientific.

Exactly the sort of thing they’d be screaming about if the Orange Climate Demon had done it. And you shouldn’t praise intellectual rubbish because it is instrumentally useful to you, least of all if you claim to be following the science and to despise yahoos who make things up to suit their tastes. But they are no longer discussing the science, just the politics. Oh wait. That’s all they were doing in 2009 as well.

Now to be sure “Climate Forward” has not just drunk but chugged the climate-cliché Kool Aid; that same newsletter also said:

“In a series of articles published last year, my colleagues and I charted the remarkable rise of clean energy in China, and the degree to which the United States is falling behind in the race to adopt low-carbon technologies like solar power and electric vehicles. Importantly, these products are often less expensive and provide greater convenience than fossil fuel technologies…. We examined how China was exporting cheap solar panels and electric vehicles around the globe, reshaping economies from South Africa to Brazil.”

Reshaping economies? Chinese solar panels reshaped Brazil’s economy? Do they even stop to think what they’re regurgitating any more? It seems not (shades of Orwell’s “Politics and the English language“), because they also write:

“The Chinese government has been a patient supporter of the country’s clean technologies for decades now – its policies governing rare earths, which are essential components in everything from electric cars to supersonic jets, date back some six decades. U.S. policy, by contrast, has been all over the place.”

Another way of putting it would be that democracies often change policies if their results don’t impress the people affected by them whereas tyrannies charge ahead even with obvious blunders because they can and do shoot anyone who complains. But it wouldn’t sound so glorious if thus expressed.

So they’ve left logic and evidence alike way behind in their surge toward what they call “Living in the future”. Shades of Lincoln Steffens’ infamous 1919 verdict on the Soviet Union: “I have seen the future and it works.” Not that we expect them to know that reference either.

Meanwhile Anthony Watts, regrettably under one of those cheesy AI images that gives people too many fingers, takes defenders of the “Endangerment Finding” to task for completely misrepresenting the evidence on everything from extreme heat to extreme weather to air pollution to infectious diseases. And Willis Eschenbach chides them thusly:

“For those complaining about the end of the Endangerment Finding that said CO2 was the very devil, science is tested in part by successful predictions … and alarmists have only produced serial failed doomcasts.”

Then, under the heading “Here’s one example among many” he reprints a warning from John P. Holdren, “President Obama’s senior science advisor”, that famine due to the dreaded carbon pollution could kill up to a billion people by 2020.

If the Endangerment Finding were based on sound science we would have seen the evidence by now. Instead agriculture is flourishing as never before, feeding more humans and better than at any time in our history.