More work to be done! EPA’s Proposed Reigning in of Obama climate regs ‘assumes no change in the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding’

This week EPA announced their proposed Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) replacement regulation for the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP). The Obama Administration’s CPP regulation was intended to achieve much of the CO₂ emissions reductions the US proposed under the Paris climate accord. The new ACE regulation is a substantially reduced version of the CPP, which gives much more power to the states and less to the EPA, and assumes no change in the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding (EF).

This means that the Trump Administration is not currently challenging the EF. This means that EPA will have to do something to reduce CO₂emissions in their new ACE, just not as much as under the CPP. And the EF will continue to lurk in the background to tempt possible future Democratic Administration to quickly reinstitute the CPP should they come back to power.

What May Happen if the Federal Courts Decide to Throw Out the ACE?

If this should happen, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute advocates that EPA should reconsider the Endangerment Finding issued by the Obama EPA, claiming the greenhouse gases are endangering the nation’s health and welfare. If the reconsideration concludes that this is not the case, EPA could no longer regulate emissions of carbon dioxide. As the readers of this blog know, I and many scientists believe that the EF should be reconsidered and revoked.

If all this comes to pass, the courts are likely to soon review the proposed ACE regulation, which may then lead to a reconsideration of the EF, which underpins the entire Obama EPA’s efforts to reduce emissions of CO₂. All this may transpire over the next few years.

I believe that it would have been better to reconsider the EF now rather than first trying to weaken the proposed CPP regulation. But that is what the Trump Administration has chosen to do. The science simply does not support the validity of the EF, as frequently discussed on this blog, and the sooner it is killed the better. The climate alarmists may end up losing the EF war in an effort to win the CPP versus ACE battle. I hope so.