Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that his agency will seek to roll back the foundation for many of the rules his agency has imposed upon Americans since the Obama administration.
Repealing the endangerment finding will be the “largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” Zeldin said in a video posted to social media platform X.
EPA issued the finding after a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that said greenhouse gases are pollutants falling under the Clean Air Act, according to Axios. In 2009, former President Barack Obama gave EPA the power to establish emissions standards for sources that it could show have an impact impact on health.
During a Tuesday appearance on the “Ruthless” podcast, Zeldin explained why his agency will seek that rule’s repeal.
“A lot of people are out there listening, they might not know what the endangerment finding is. If you were to ask congressional Democrats to describe what it is, the left would say that it means that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, carbon dioxide is an endangerment to human health. They might say methane is a pollutant, methane is an endangerment to human health,” Zeldin said.
“That’s an oversimplified, I would say, inaccurate way to describe it,” Zeldin said.
Zeldin said leaps of liberal logic were the true foundation of the rule.
“The Obama administration said that carbon dioxide, when mixed with a bunch of other well-mixed gasses, greenhouse gasses, that it contributes to climate change,” he said.
“How much? They don’t say. It’s more than zero. And they say that climate change engenders human health, so because of these different mental leaps, and by the way, when it’s carbon dioxide mixed with all these well-mixed gases, they were only looking at mobile sources, like vehicles, but a bunch of those greenhouse gases aren’t even emitted from vehicles,” he said.
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“Now why does all this matter?” he said, adding, “Well, then, there were all sorts of vehicle regulations that followed.”
“Ruthless” co-host Josh Holmes called the finding “the hub to the spoke of the left’s environmental agenda, essentially.”
Zeldin agreed, saying, “This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Zeldin said environmental extremists have had their way.
“Most Americans, we care about the environment, we want clean air, land, and water. Conservatives love the environment, want to be good stewards of the environment. There are people who, then, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” he said.
“In the name of environmental justice, they will get tens of billions of dollars appropriated to their friends, rather than actually remediating environmental issues,” he said.
“So they created this endangerment finding, and then they’re able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence, in many cases, a lot of forms of segments of our economy, and it costs Americans a lot of money,” he said.
“It’s kind of a big deal,” he said.
“It’s one agency, in one year, doing more deregulation than the entire federal government, across all agencies — across entire presidencies, when you look back in history. That’s how much of a mess it is that we inherited,” Zeldin said, according to Fox News.
“The left went so far overboard,” Zeldin said.
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