It’s most assuredly not a medical question, nor is it a climate question. The EPA is going to announce (if it hasn’t already at the time this post is published) a roll-back of its Gina McCarthy-Barack Obama era “finding” that atmospheric carbon dioxide was a pollutant, a finding that enabled the exploding and increasingly intrusive and costly regulatory environment over a host of CO2 emission items.
The final rule, set to be made public later this week, removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse-gas emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
It wouldn’t apply to rules governing emissions from power plants and other stationary sources such as oil-and-gas facilities, the officials said. But repealing the finding could open up the door to rolling back regulations that affect those facilities.
Many of those latter regulations do need to be removed, but not all. Sulphur and mercury in smokestack emissions, for instance, still are things, but these are easily controlled—and have been for years—even with now-aging technologies and will remain regulated. CFC impacts on atmospheric ozone is less settled, but will remain regulated until a more definitive answer—by actual scientists, not government bureaucrats with science degrees or degreed folks employed by the climate funding industry—is reached.
The kicker is in this:
Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year.
Even were that true, it is, or it would be in a properly objective court, irrelevant to the question of whether the McCarthy/Biden EPA finding can be repealed. Notice that: can be, not should be. This is a purely legal question: can one administration withdraw a regulatory finding and associated regulations that a prior administration enacted? Of course it can, and a current administration can rescind such things unilaterally. Only Congressionally-enacted statutes require subsequent Congressionally-enacted statutes to be rescinded. All it takes is judges and Justices who will honor their oaths of office and hew themselves to what our Constitution and the statutes before them say rather than what they might wish they said.
Of course, many of today’s District and appellate judges are badly trained by such claptrap as the chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, used by the Federal Judicial Center to “train” judges on climate systems, attribution science, and methodologies used to link greenhouse gas emissions to specific impacts by representing these things as settled science. The chapter has since been removed from the manual, but not necessarily the separate “training” associated with it, and certainly not the “training” already done.
As the WSJ correctly noted, here come now the climate-funding industry and its fee-seeking lawyers.
Environmental groups have said they would challenge a rollback in the courts, and it could be years before litigation is resolved.
Because of course they will. There’re tons of money to be made from their manufactured climate hysteria, and that income pig trough needs to be protected. There also are fees to be collected from those lawsuits.
Never mind that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which humans and plants aren’t the only species that don’t eat.