But it’s not game over for future climate action—and understanding why allows for a more nuanced picture of where the fight actually stands now.
By Bill McKibben
Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty
It fell to Doug Burgum, once the governor of North Dakota and now the Secretary of the Interior, to offer something resembling a scientific explanation for the Trump Administration’s decision to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide pose a risk to the planet’s health. “CO 2 was never a pollutant,” Burgum said. “When we breathe, we emit CO 2. Plants need CO 2 to survive and grow. They thrive with more CO 2.”
Considering that, in recent weeks, Burgum has also appeared in a cartoon with a lump of coal known as Coalie (“Mine, Baby, Mine!”) on social media, such reasoning is perhaps the best that one can hope for. It’s roughly the equivalent of explaining to a drowning person that you’re not going to throw him a life preserver because water is a building block of life. Carbon dioxide is, in fact, among the most dangerous substances at work on the Earth; as it collects in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it is rapidly raising the Earth’s temperature, melting its poles, and setting off endless rounds of flood and fire. The latest warning came this past week, from a global team of scientists who noted, in a journal paper, that “we may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” Indeed, recent weeks have produced predictions that a new El Niño is in the offing for later this year and, with it, the near certainty of new and dire temperature records.
Given all that, the decision to terminate the E.P.A.’s finding—which the agency issued in 2009, two years after the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act—has to rank as one of the signal moments in America’s descent into idiocracy. Literally every major scientific organization in the world, not to mention every other U.S. President since 1988, and even all the largest oil companies, have acknowledged the dangers of greenhouse gases. The decision is of a piece with the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and its efforts to disconnect satellites and monitoring stations—including, in December, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder—that the world has relied on to track changes in the planet’s chemistry and temperature.
The repeal of the finding will face significant legal challenges, but the climate-skeptic industry is convinced that it has won a final battle. “We are pretty close to total victory,” Myron Ebell, a veteran of the movement, who fought climate and conservation initiatives for decades and served in the first Trump Administration, told the Times. Marc Morano, who worked for Rush Limbaugh and played a key role in the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry before he switched to attacking climate-change policy, appears in an E.P.A. news release stating that the Administration’s actions “will make America much safer from any future climate wreckage inflicted by potential presidents like Gavin Newsom or AOC.”
A Times piece on the E.P.A.’s decision ran under a headline ratifying a sense that the Rubicon is now in the rearview mirror of a gas-guzzling S.U.V.: “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change.” The fear is understandable—the finding has been the linchpin of federal regulations on everything from cars to coal-fired power stations. But it’s not, in fact, game over for future climate action, and understanding why allows for a more nuanced picture of where the climate fight actually stands now.
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