Part 2: The Impending Battle Over the Endangerment Finding
By Bob Sussman
Bob Sussman was Deputy Administrator of EPA during 1993-1994 and Senior Policy Counsel to the Administrator during 2009-2013.
Climate Science on Trial
The current global consensus on climate science is the outgrowth of decades of research, analysis, and modeling by teams of credentialed scientists across multiple disciplines. Their findings have been fully debated, documented, and peer-reviewed. But as discussed in Part 1 of this blog, the current Trump Administration is ignoring this formidable body of scientific work and conducting a massive purge of climate programs across the federal government. To justify these draconian cuts, Trump officials have misrepresented climate concerns as the product of “climate change religion,” “climate fanaticism,” “the climate change alarm industry,” “woke chimeras of the Left” and “exaggerated and implausible climate threats.”
We should insist that the Trump/Zeldin push to undo the 2009 endangerment finding be accompanied by an open and impartial public process to examine the scientific evidence for global warming and its impacts. This transparent process would subject the Administration’s climate denialism to rigorous independent scrutiny and provide the moment of clarity we need to restore climate science to a central role in U.S. law and policy.
Despite its contemptuous rejection of climate change, the Administration has not to date provided any examples of biased research that exaggerates warming trends and their impacts or makes alarmist predictions of extreme events without credible scientific support. Indeed, many experts argue that previous climate assessments were overly conservative in their assumptions, and recent science shows that the true magnitude of expected rises in global temperatures and their destructive consequences is greater than earlier believed.
For example, NOAA research (recently released without any publicity) found that in 2024 carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew at the fastest rate in recorded history—3.7 parts per million—putting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at a level not seen in at least 3 million years. Scientists pointed to this rise in carbon dioxide levels as evidence of a “climate feedback loop in which rising temperatures cause natural ecosystems to deteriorate, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere and causing the planet to warm even faster.”
If the science were as deficient as the Administration claims, a logical solution would be to increase our investment in climate research in order to improve confidence in our predictions of future warming and its impacts. But the Administration is instead fixated on shutting down climate research and blocking additional studies that would deepen our understanding of warming trends and their effects.
This knee-jerk hostility to climate research raises uncomfortable questions. Are Trump officials hiding from climate science because of the risk that further research will contradict their claim that this science is a cynical invention of the extreme left? Is climate science now anathema because Donald Trump has repeatedly declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and data refuting this claim would be inconvenient and embarrassing to the President? Is it really plausible that the thousands of scientists working on climate change are producing bogus and misleading data despite their strong professional qualifications, the high quality of their work, and the safeguards of peer review?
Most troubling is the Administration’s insistence that the public must be “protected” from the mere mention of climate change lest it evoke unwarranted “fear” and “anxiety.” The idea that our citizens cannot be trusted to make informed judgments about threats to our society is big brotherism at its worst and substitutes government thought control for our democratic tradition of relying on the marketplace of ideas to distinguish credible science from unreliable claims.
A Moment of Truth on Climate Science?
If the Trump team is serious about building a defensible case that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger public health and welfare, it will need to produce more than empty rhetoric. But trying to assemble credible scientific data to refute the precepts of mainstream climate science could backfire and expose the tenuous basis for the Administration’s position.
There are few respected scientists who will stake their reputations on fringe theories that the Administration may advance, such as that global warming is in fact “benefiting” mankind. At the same time, climate researchers and experts will undoubtedly mobilize in force to oppose scientific claims they consider dubious and set the record straight by marshalling the best available evidence of the existence and severity of global warming. Should the Administration try to suppress these views and stage-manage a favorable outcome, many will denounce its process as a sham and publicity stunt.
A robust and unbiased public process to examine the credibility of climate science is unlikely to sway public opinion in the Administration’s direction and could have the opposite effect. If thought leaders and informed observers perceive the Trump scientific case as half-baked and contrived, and leading experts effectively convey the full body of evidence that demonstrates the reality of climate change, public concern about global warming (which is already substantial) may well intensify, creating a backlash against the Administration’s aggressive denial of climate change and increasing pressure for government action to help communities cope with flooding, wildfires, drought, hurricanes, and other climate-related disasters.
Taking Refuge in Legalisms
Mindful of these risks, the Administration might decide that the safer strategy is to steer clear of a pitched battle on climate science and instead undo the endangerment finding in a low-profile and abbreviated process that focuses on legal technicalities that the public cannot readily grasp.
To expose the contradictions in this strategy, scientists, opinion leaders and supportive members of Congress must highlight the Administration’s refusal to acknowledge or debate climate science while simultaneously demanding that the public reject it as a false “religion” that has no legitimacy in setting policy or understanding the dangers of a warming world.
For example, bypassing the science, the Administration might argue that the emissions of individual sectors of the U.S. economy are too small to conclude that they cause or contribute to rises in global temperatures and therefore may “endanger” public health or welfare. However, apart from its questionable legal merits, this approach could be challenged as conceding the reality of climate change but dodging U.S. responsibility by slicing and dicing emissions data to create a false impression that the U.S. role in global warming is negligible.
Another ploy the Administration might use to avoid engaging on climate science is to argue that the endangerment finding should be withdrawn because it unlawfully ignored the costs of addressing climate change. Zeldin and other Trump officials have already claimed that the finding is flawed on this ground. However, regardless of whether cost is even relevant to whether climate pollutants “endanger” public health or welfare under the Clean Air Act, the idea that we should do nothing about climate change because of the unacceptable economic impacts of taking action is indefensible and should be directly refuted.
Rather than turning a blind eye to cost, prior administrations have quantified the costs and benefits of individual climate regulations in detailed economic analyses for each rulemaking. As these analyses document, Zeldin’s claim that EPA climate regulations have “cost” the U.S. economy over $1 trillion disregards the substantial costs of inaction on climate change, which economic studies show are staggering and dwarf the price tag for mitigation and adaptation.
The public is already sensitized to the large magnitude of these costs from near-daily reports of the enormous damage caused by extreme heat, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and sea-level rise and will likely be skeptical of the assertion that the costs of climate change are too small to matter. Thus, should the Administration insist that addressing climate change is prohibitively expensive and the endangerment finding was therefore unjustified, supporters of climate action must counter by emphasizing the immense economic damage that unchecked global warming is already causing and the likelihood of more severe harm in the future.
The Administration campaign to purge climate concerns from government programs and muzzle climate scientists is intended to stifle public debate on the threat of climate change and the need to combat it. The most effective response to this dangerous strategy is to force climate science back to center stage and subject the Administration’s climate denialism to intense scrutiny in a high-profile public forum. The impending attack on the endangerment finding provides a unique opportunity to create this forum. If the Trump team responds by refusing to engage on climate science, presenting a weak and unconvincing rebuttal of the mainstream scientific consensus, denying the long-term impacts of global warming and their costs to society, or using arcane legalisms to confuse the public, the Administration’s opponents must call out the bankruptcy of its position and hammer home the scientific case for strong climate action.
Defeating the Trump War on Climate Science
The Trump Administration’s war on climate science is unprecedented in our history. Never has a democratically elected government used its vast powers to attack and seek to discredit a recognized body of scientific thought that has achieved broad acceptance by scientists and policymakers around the globe. Yet in its first 100 days in office, the Trump Administration has methodically defunded climate programs across the executive branch, shut down hundreds of millions of dollars in climate research, and sought to ban any mention of climate change by government agencies and recipients of federal funding. This pervasive censoring of climate science threatens to plunge the United States–the world’s leader in open scientific research and discovery–into a new dark age of propaganda and fear mongering. The best antidote is to shine the light of day on climate science and what it tells us about the future of our planet.