The Trump administration has made another in-your-face move away from global greenhouse gas-reduction commitments by barring U.S. officials from traveling to China to participate in an international conference to draft the next UN climate assessment. Trump is also on the verge of jettisoning an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy that served as the backbone of U.S. climate regulations.
Upon receiving the news that the trip to Hangzhou, China for a Feb. 24 to 28 meeting of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was a no go, Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate adviser was likely disappointed. Lest anyone miss the message, NASA also terminated its contract with a U.S.-based group of scientists and staff who were working closely with Calvin on the IPCC's next climate assessment, due to be released in 2029, the Washington Post reported.
The IPCC has issued six climate assessments since the U.N. body's creation in 1988. The release of each of these, accompanied by great fanfare, has triggered warnings of dire consequences unless global emissions of greenhouse gases are not substantially reduced. With the absence of American participation in drafting the next report, calls for climate-related sacrifices by governments of other major emitters of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases risk encountering political resistance. After all, if the U.S. isn't playing, is there really a game?
The shunning of the U.N. climate working group comes on the heels of Trump's Jan. 20 executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the December 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, something he had done in his first term, only to have the Biden administration rejoin the pact in 2021. Now Trump is going one step further by scuttling U.S. cooperation in crafting the next IPCC Climate Assessment.
Rather than move away from fossil fuels in the spirit of global climate negotiators, Washington is headed in the opposite direction. Trump officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, have identified over 600 energy and other infrastructure projects to be fast-tracked under Trump's day-one declaration of a National Energy Emergency. Projects include an oil pipeline under Lake Michigan, several natural gas power plants, and new liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals on the Gulf Coast.
Abandoning an EPA Regulatory Tool
Of even greater importance is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's Feb. 26 recommendation to the White House that his agency repeal an Obama-era finding that underpins EPA's authority to regulate manmade greenhouse gases. Known as the "endangerment finding," the policy was rooted in a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, that said EPA had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
Two years later, Obama administration officials at EPA used the court's decision to limit emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources. Under Biden, the regulations were expanded to include tailpipe emissions (leading to the EV mandate), restrictions on oil and gas development on federal lands and waters, and even household appliances. Other federal agencies and numerous state agencies have cited the endangerment finding when imposing regulations costing billions of dollars.
Environmental groups are vowing to take the Trump EPA to court, aware of the threat that tossing the endangerment finding would pose to the entire climate-related regulatory structure. David Doninger of the Natural Resources Defense Council is optimistic that the Trump administration's effort will be shot down in the courts.
"This would be a fool's errand," he told the Associated Press. "In the face of overwhelming science, it's impossible to think the EPA could develop a contradictory finding that would stand up in court."
But during his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Zeldin rejected the idea that the Supreme Court had "mandated" that EPA treat manmade carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
"The decision does not require the EPA" to act on greenhouse gases, "it authorizes it," Zeldin told Massachusetts' Democrat Sen. Ed Markey. "There are steps the EPA would have to take in order for an obligation to be created."
Markey and Dininger hew to the "science-is-settled" narrative on human-induced climate change, according to which the only question is how rigorous regulations need to be to force the nation into a green-energy transition. Trump calls the whole enterprise a "Green New Scam," while Zeldin rejects the idea that his agency is legally bound to regulate greenhouse gases.
The forthcoming litigation will probably wind up at the Supreme Court, which in recent years has curtailed administrative agencies' power to regulate absent a specific congressional mandate. In its landmark 2022 decision, West Virginia v. EPA, the high court ruled that EPA lacked congressional authority to issue a rule that led to the closure of coal-fired power plants in the Mountaineer State and elsewhere.
Challenging Zeldin could lead to the Supreme Court's revisiting, and perhaps even overturning, its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, an outcome climate alarmists don't want to contemplate.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
