The "Endangerment Finding" on CO₂ Was Wrong from the Beginning

Greenhouses gases that drive global warming should have had a much stronger position in the EPA's mandate.

As you may have heard, the “new” EPA is planning to revoke the 2009 “endangerment finding” that declared CO₂ and other greenhouse gases a threat to public health. This will allow the EPA to cease regulating CO₂ emissions — at an unspeakable cost to humanity’s already-too-feeble effort to ward off catastrophic climate change — but as a nice perk to American automotive and fossil fuel industries.

This original finding was that “CO₂ is a threat to human health, and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.” OK, fine, I guess, sounds good.

But the “new” EPA’s legal argument was one that I think was, in fact, quite good. CO₂ is not a direct threat to human health. That’s a fact, and they’re correct. CO₂ is a staggering indirect threat to human health, via its role in global warming; but the Clean Air Act is about direct threats. So we should expect their argument will be upheld, and the United States will very rapidly become humanity’s worst contributor to history’s worst existential threat.

I argue — perhaps controversially — that the real scientists at the EPA during the 2009 era made a terribly naive and foolish move by “finding” that CO₂ is a threat to human health. I mean, yeah, it can be — but only at unrealistic concentrations.

To wit: Today, there is about a third more CO₂ in our atmosphere than normal — it’s about 427 ppm (0.0427%). A very tiny proportion. When does it get to be risky? Well, a lot higher; it has to compete with regular O₂ in your lungs to give you a problem. As an example, on Apollo 13, they had to jury rig CO₂ scrubbers because its concentration was approaching 20,000 ppm (equal to 2%), and any higher would have been toxic.

In no Planet Earth scenario would atmospheric CO₂ reach 2%. That’s just plain silly — by a factor of about 50. So the fact is that atmospheric CO₂ has never been a direct threat to human health.

Nobody ever argued that it was — and the 2009 EPA scientists were careless to make such a house-of-cards argument.

So putting that in as part of the Clean Air Act was a foolish way to protect against an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The 2009 EPA should have realized that; they should have realized that they were writing legislation that was profoundly susceptible to any random person going “Wait, no?”

Here is what should have happened

As the Clean Air Act was designed to provide a framework for regulating emissions of substances that are directly harmful to people, the 2009 EPA’s strategy for regulating CO₂ should have been of a very different nature — because in those days, the EPA was actually an Agency that Protected the Environment:

CO₂ needed its own category. It needed an Act of its own, robust enough to withstand fleeting political shifts. It should not have been lumped into the Clean Air Act.

Remember, it’s trivial to prove that fossil fuels burned by humans is the only driver of global warming:

• Spectroscopy proves that all the new heat being withheld in the upper atmosphere is held by CO₂.

• Isotopic analysis proves that 100% of this new CO₂ in the atmosphere comes from humans burning fossil fuel, and from no other source.

The gist is that we’re about to lose regulation of CO₂ emissions. This will increase CO₂ emissions and make everything worse.

The simple fact is that the 2009 EPA did not have a sufficient grasp on politics. They classified CO₂ as “directly harmful to human health.” Its impact is indirect, not direct; which paved the way for them to lose in court and for the anti-science lobby to steamroll right over reality.

There will always be an anti-science lobby. Sometimes it’s weak; sometimes it’s powerful. But it will always be there. And defenses against them must be robust from the beginning, not hopelessly fragile.