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"Just making s**t up" — David Roberts sounds off on the EPA
"To say members of Congress didn’t anticipate a specific pollutant is just f**king comical."
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On the heels of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announcing that it’s repealing the endangerment finding — the legal foundation for the federal government’s regulation of greenhouses gases — we checked in with the always-colorful David Roberts to get some expert insight on what it means.
Roberts, author of the excellent Volts newsletter and a longtime friend of Public Notice, pointed out that rescinding the endangerment finding is one thing; surviving the inevitable legal challenges is another.
“How the fuck are they going to do that?” Roberts said. “If you can get the Supreme Court to rule that carbon is not a danger to public health, it will mark the point at which they have abandoned all pretense, because that’s just a flat out lie.”
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“Are they brazen enough? Does John Roberts feel invulnerable enough at this point that the Court can just say black is white, up is down, and climate is not a problem? That’ll be interesting to watch.”
A full transcript of Roberts’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.
Thor Benson
Let’s start with the background of the endangerment finding, which stemmed from a Supreme Court case nearly 20 years ago. Fill us in on how we got from there to here.
David Roberts
The point of the 2007 trial at the Supreme Court was to determine whether greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The result was the Court said the language of the law is ambiguous, and thus they deferred to EPA’s judgment. So, in other words, yes, greenhouse gases qualified as air pollutants because of the Chevron doctrine, which the Court has since struck down, which said the courts should defer to agencies on complex rules of law implementation.
Basically, that 2007 case was a notable example of the Court saying, “Well, the Clean Air Act is somewhat ambiguous, so we’re gonna leave it to EPA.” That triggered a bunch of legal obligations. If it is a greenhouse gas, then EPA is lawfully required to determine whether it’s a danger to public health. They did, and that’s the endangerment finding.
The EPA then spent a couple of years under Obama pulling together a copious body of evidence that climate change is a danger to human beings. That triggered further legal obligations. If greenhouse gases are a danger to human health, then EPA has to regulate stationary sources — power plants and factories. It also has to regulate mobile sources of the pollutant — cars and trucks. That’s what Obama’s EPA did.