Earth Matters: Adopting one of the worst climate science denier tropes, EPA says greenhouse gases aren't a danger

Calling Republicans liars these days is the ultimate redundancy. Lies seem to accompany practically every exhale. And because nobody from the boss on down is held to account for their lies, even by voters who claim to hate lying politicians, there’s no change in their behavior.

The official lies breathed recently by the chiefs of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy are that the industrial exhale of carbon emissions is not as harmful as it is beneficial, and changing climate won’t be as economically destructive as has been claimed in scientific report after report since the 1990s. These lies were the preface to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcing Tuesday that pro-fossil fuel crusaders are being rewarded with the overturning of the EPA’s 2009 greenhouse gas “endangerment” ruling that they’ve been panting for the past decade and a half.

To be succinct, the scientific underpinning of that ruling was laid out in the agency’s 210-page assessment at the time. That was a response mandated by a 2007 Supreme Court decision regarding the intent of the Clean Air Act. The assessment pointed to ever more evidence that six accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were causing tremendous harm through heatwaves, stronger, more frequent storms and accompanying floods, with regional droughts and widespread effects on crop yields, all of this affecting human health. That was 16 years ago. The described impacts and others are being felt far more widely and intensely than back then, just as climatologists predicted.

Screenshot2025-07-30at10.50.41PM.png — They couldn’t have done a better job of misinterpreting and distorting if the remaining Koch brother had been the editor.

Without that court ruling, the EPA would not have authority to regulate emissions. If finalized after a 45-day comment period, the retreat from the endangerment ruling would remove all greenhouse gas standards for passenger vehicles, light, and heavy trucks, and heavy-duty engines. But the administration doesn’t plan on stopping there. Regulation of other greenhouse gas sources are on the table too.

The EPA’s 301-page justification for reversing its endangerment ruling fails on several grounds. Chief among them is a deliberate butchering of facts and the implicit view that the thousands of scientists who have been saying for decades that carbon emissions are causing global warming that harms the public — with worse to come — are wrong.

As pointed out by Jean Chemnick at GreenWire (paywalled), Zeldin “made several inaccurate comments” about the reversal on a right-wing podcast "Ruthless" a few hours before he announced the proposal to dump the endangerment ruling, He called the move "a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,” trying not to appear too bloodthirsty. He went on to falsely accuse the Obama era EPA of not following the right procedure in assessing the greenhouse gas danger posed, falsely claimed the agency didn’t allow for public comment, and falsely claimed that the assessors didn’t include economic benefits along with costs in determining if there was danger.

Chemnick writes:

EPA in 2009 did consider the benefits of heat-trapping emissions. The finding acknowledged short-term benefits to “certain crops” and to forestry from warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.

But it added that there “is significant uncertainty about whether this benefit will be achieved given the various potential adverse impacts of climate change on crop yield, such as the increasing risk of extreme weather events.”

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was also on hand Tuesday at the Indianapolis car dealership where Zeldin announced the move. He was there in part to spotlight the DOE’s 151-page A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate released a week ago. The short version? It ought to be another chapter of Merchants of Doubt, the seminal 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway exposing the infamous network and techniques of the army of climate deniers that have plagued America since 1977. That was the year Exxon began covering up what its own scientists said about climate change. The rationale for EPA’s deregulatory move would be merely a bad joke if this were a movie we’re living in.

Wright who dares call himself a “climate realist,” said: “The rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries is a story worth celebrating. Yet we are told—relentlessly—that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat. Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity. As someone who values data, I know that improving the human condition depends on expanding access to reliable, affordable energy.”

He’s certainly right about reliable and affordable. But no mention of clean.

His views are clearer in “Bettering Human Lives,” more a manifesto than a report published in 2024 by the fracking firm Liberty Energy, where he was CEO. In a letter introducing the report, he wrote: “Another thing that we often hear about climate change is that it leads to a significant increase in extreme weather events with deadly consequences. This claim is false. Extensive reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually show no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or weather-related droughts.”

This is an outright lie noted in this video by one of the lead authors of the IPCC report—atmospheric scientist Jim Kossin. “We have high confidence that extreme precipitation events are increasing in intensity and frequency and that human actions are playing a substantial role,” he said.

“For the EPA to repeal the 2009 finding borders on criminal negligence,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University.

The government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, states that the “effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States.” It adds that “without rapid and deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, the risks of accelerating sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather and other harmful climate impacts will continue to grow.” Along with its four predecessors, the archived assessment was pulled off its official website a few weeks ago by the Trump administration.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report states it is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed land, sea and air since pre-industrial times—and that these gases pose significant threats

However, Wright obviously doesn’t buy what thousands of scientists have been saying:

Perhaps most telling of all is how Wright has chosen to deal with so-called “Orwellian squelching of science.” Included in the press release on the greenhouse gas review are listed members of the DOE’s 2025 Climate Working Group that produced it. It’s a cabal of five of the most notorious climate science deniers out there, all of them with doctorates: Steve Koonin, John Christy, Judith Curry, Ross McKitrick, Roy W. Spencer. The folks at Skeptical Science have an ongoing list of debunked arguments made by these five and their ilk. Given the ongoing administration erasure of climate data and demolition of agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, perhaps Wright could look in the mirror regarding any squelching. Not surprising given Project 2025’s proposal that EVERY reference to climate change should be removed from federal documents.

As noted from the outset, calling out the Republican liars and their lies does absolutely nothing to change their behavior. They’ve got an agenda. It’s a perilous one. You can expect them to ignore what is likely to be a ferocious response during the comment period. If the reversal of the endangement ruling is finalized. Then it will be up to litigation to stop this anti-scientific assault on our well-being. It seems probable if not inevitable that this will wind up in front the Supreme Court a year or two down the road. Back in 2007, when the court ruled the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act if it found them dangerous, the five justices who signed onto that majority decision are no longer on the bench. Three of the four who voted against it still are.

Tick, tick, tick.

—Meteor Blades

There are a ton of articles and videos on the EPA’s retreat. Here are three that look at the matter from different angles:

Revoking EPA’s endangerment finding — the keystone of U.S. climate policies — isn’t simple and could have unintended consequences
Architect of EPA's 'endangerment finding' warns about consequences of Trump administration's repeal
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes NexT? A conversation with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman about life after the endangerment finding.

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

RESOURCES AND ACTION

Fridays for Future Plans Global Climate Strike During COP30 in Brazil. The group is planning the next Global Climate Strike for November 14, the first Friday during the UN climate change conference in Belém, Brazil.
‘Use it or lose it’: These clean-energy tax credits will be gone soon. All those Inflation Reduction Act incentives to switch to clean and typically cheaper-to-run electric appliances and EVs, make home efficiency upgrades, and install rooftop solar panels won’t available after year’s end.
The life of plastic. Here’s how plastic contaminates entire ecosystems, including our food.
What to do (and avoid) in extreme heat. Tips for keeping kids, adults, and the elderly cool and safe — even without air conditioning.
The Air Quality Index and how to use it, explained

STATS

RESEARCH & STUDIES

Prolonged wind droughts in a warming climate threaten global wind power security. Global warming will generate more frequent wind “droughts” that could threaten energy security in some regions. Published at Nature Climate Change.
Green backlash and right-wing populism. The authors provide a narrative review of the literature on the political consequences of climate policies, highlighting the presence of backlash among citizens negatively affected by decarbonization efforts. Published at Nature Climate Change.
Blueprints for sustainable plant production through the utilization of crop wild relatives and their microbiomes. The authors say conserving crops’ wild relatives in their natural environments, together with the complex communities of microorganisms that live with them, could lay the foundation to unlock novel mechanisms for crop resilience and new strategies for achieving food security. Published at Nature Communications.
Weathering change: Fewer cold fatalities, more heat emergencies in California. As temperatures rise, California is experiencing fewer deaths from cold temperatures, which outweigh increased deaths from extreme heat. Hotter temperatures sharply increase emergency department visits—a previously overlooked consequence of climate change that could place a greater burden on the health care system. Published at Science Advances.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Gorilla habitats and pristine forest at risk as DRC opens half of country to oil and gas drilling bids by Phoebe Weston at The Guardian. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is opening crucial gorilla habitats and pristine forests to bids for oil and gas drilling, with plans to carve up more than half the country into fossil fuel blocks. The blocks opened for auction cover 124 million hectares (306 million acres) of land and inland waters described by experts as the “world’s worst place to prospect for oil” because they hold vast amounts of carbon and are home to some of the planet’s most precious wildlife habitats, including endangered lowland gorillas and bonobo. This year the government has launched a licensing round for 52 oil blocks. These are in addition to three blocks previously awarded. Of the total area, 64% is intact tropical forest, according to the spatial mapping and analysis in a new report by Earth Insight. This expansion of oil and gas development is at odds with DRC’s commitments to protect biodiversity and climate protection, experts warn.

Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International

I've Made It My Life's Mission To Hunt Down A Unique Kind Of Criminal. Here's How I Catch Them. "I knew the global market for ivory carvings and statues was causing destruction. But seeing a baby elephant hacked to pieces in real life is something else.” By Andrea Crosta at Huffpost Green. At the time, there were rumors that poached ivory was being sold to al Shabaab, the Somali extremists who pledged allegiance to al Qaeda. Word was that Shabaab smuggled and sold this “white gold” to overseas buyers, using the profits to fund attacks like the Westgate shopping mall assault that killed 71 in downtown Nairobi in 2013. And here we were, in Tsavo National Park, deep in Shabaab’s territory at a crime scene. The killers were so sure they wouldn’t be caught, they left their evidence strewn across the bush. And they were right — no one would hunt them. That’s because most people, including most authorities, don’t see environmental crime — which includes illegal logging, illegal fishing, gold and mining and many other linked crimes in addition to this kind of illegal wildlife trade — as real crime. What’s worse, they don’t realize organized criminal groups often fund a laundry list of other crimes, from narcotics to human trafficking, through their environmental crimes. At nearly $300 billion, environmental crime is the fourth-largest criminal enterprise on earth. The same groups that traffic people and drugs also deal in natural resources, and they do it because it’s big business, while also being lower risk than many other crimes. That’s why “large and powerful organized crime groups” are “operating in some of the most fragile and diverse ecosystems from the Amazon to the Golden Triangle” of Southeast Asia, according to the United Nation’s 2024 World Wildlife Crime Report.

These Companies Avoided Clean-Air Rules. It Took a Single Email by Maxine Joselow at The New York Times. In March, the Trump administration created a novel way for companies to potentially avoid complying with environmental rules: Simply send an email to the Environmental Protection Agency and request an exemption. In response, representatives of at least 15 coal-burning power plants, four steel mills, four chemical facilities and two mines wrote emails to the E.P.A. this spring. All 15 coal plants were ultimately exempted from requirements to curb several hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, a neurotoxin that can cause developmental problems in infants and children. All four chemical facilities were exempted from restrictions on other harmful air pollutants, including ethylene oxide, a gas linked to several types of cancer. [...] The documents also show that Eastman Chemical Company, a global chemical manufacturer, requested and received an exemption from the limits on ethylene oxide emissions for its facility in Longview, Texas. The plant released 155,483 pounds of ethylene oxide between 2008 and 2018, making it the country’s fourth-largest emitter of the gas, according to Air Alliance Houston, an environmental group. Six East Texas residents recently sued Eastman over these emissions, accusing the company of knowingly exposing the surrounding community to a carcinogen.

How clear and simple data visualizations bring the climate crisis home by Rachit Dubey at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Data visualizations are some of the most powerful tools in a climate science communicator’s playbook. The most famous have taken on enormous symbolic value—like the “Hockey Stick” graph showing rising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere since the year 1000. But designing climate visuals that are clear to the public and policy makers is not a straightforward task. Many scientific graphics, such as those in reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are designed for technical accuracy and often assume a specialized audience. As a result, they can be difficult to interpret. Prior research has shown that widely used scenario graphs can confuse viewers. For example, people often mix up uncertainty about future emissions scenarios with uncertainty in the climate models themselves. At the same time, there is growing evidence that more intuitive visualizations, informed by psychological research, can help people make better sense of climate data. For example, one study showed that simply highlighting rising temperatures in red increased support for climate action among liberal viewers. This challenge—how to make climate visuals more meaningful to the public—was the motivation behind the recent study I published in Nature Human Behavior with my colleagues in Princeton’s computer science department. We wanted to know whether some kinds of data visuals can help make climate change feel more concrete and better reflect the urgency of the crisis. Here’s an example from The Economist. It distills the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice coverage into three snapshots in 1980, 2000, and 2019. By grouping the data this way, the charts emphasize not a gradual slope but a step-wise pattern of loss. Viewers don’t need to track exact numbers. They just need to register the shrinking boundary of Arctic ice to understand what has disappeared.

One graphic from The Economist, for example, distills the long-term decline into three snapshots: sea ice coverage in 1980, 2000, and 2019. By grouping the data this way, the charts emphasize not a gradual slope but a step-wise pattern of loss. Viewers don’t need to track exact numbers. They just need to register the shrinking boundary of Arctic ice to understand what has disappeared.

Black women fight pollution and gentrification threatening Houston neighborhood by Adam Mahoney at Capital B. When Carolyn Rivera moved to Settegast, a majority-Black neighborhood in northeast Houston, 45 years ago, horses roamed the streets and nearly every homestead had a backyard farm where chickens and speckled feather guinea hens darted between rows of corn and greens. Rivera, who turns 83 next month, remembers those early days with a kind of wistful reverence. “It was absolutely a beautiful community,” she said. “Families looked out for one another. The land was a source of pride and sustenance.” But as Rivera and other Black families put down roots, Settegast began to shift beneath their feet. Recent research, co-led by Black women researchers and conducted specifically with Black women residents, found that 80% of Black women in the neighborhood live in high-risk soil contamination zones, with 80% of those residents reporting chronic health conditions. Industrial sites and a rail yard surround the neighborhood, and housing costs have surged even as pollution persists, driving displacement of long-term Black residents. Community members are using grassroots research to push for soil cleanup, better health care access, and protections against unchecked development. Rivera said: “We know our worth, and it has taken me all this time to realize we also need to be the ones to fight for it, and that we have the power to.”

Volunteers Noelle Romero (left) and Corinne Smith (right) pull weeds around a row of tomato plants during a community work day at the Agroecology Commons farm.

A Groundbreaking California Farming Collective Navigates the Loss of Federal Grants by Riley Ramirez at Civil Eats. Lesley Swain spent most of her adult life teaching English to middle and high school students in Oakland and Hayward, California. The 51-year-old used to joke with herself that when she retired, she would become a farmer. Then, about two years ago, Swain decided she didn’t want to wait any longer. She quit her job and started looking for agricultural work. But with no farming on her resume, she struggled to find opportunities to gain experience. Eventually she found Agroecology Commons, a small nonprofit farming collective based in nearby El Sobrante, where she signed up for Bay Area Farmer-to-Farmer Training (BAFFT), a nine-month program for beginning farmers. Swain is now an apprentice with Berkeley Basket, an urban backyard community-supported agriculture project, through a program that Agroecology Commons offered to BAFFT graduates. “It’s given me a path that is so healthy,” Swain said. “This is what I want to do, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it.” Agroecology Commons has helped aspiring farmers like Swain since its founding five years ago. But like many organizations, it must now do more with less.

WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET

ECOPINION

The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian. As Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data said in 2021 of renewable energy: “In 2009, it was more than three times as expensive as coal. Now the script has flipped, and a new solar plant is almost three times cheaper than a new coal one. The price of electricity from solar declined by 89% between 2009 and 2019.” But even cheap is a misnomer: wind and sun are free and inexhaustible; you just need devices to collect the energy and transform it into electricity (and transmission lines to distribute it). Free energy! We need to get people to recognize that is what’s on offer, along with energy independence – the real version, whereby if we do it right, we could build cooperatives, local (and hyperlocal or just autonomous individual) energy systems, thereby undermining predatory for-profit utilities companies as well as the fossil fuel industry. Renewable energy could be energy justice and energy democracy, as well as clean energy. An energy revolution is underway in this century, though it’s unfolded in ways slow enough and technical enough for most people not to notice (and I assume it’s nowhere near finished). It is astonishing – a powerful solution to the climate crisis and the depredations of the fossil fuel industry and for-profit utilities. Making it more visible would make more people more enthused about it as a solution, a promise, a possibility we can, should, must pursue swiftly and wholeheartedly.

Why We Should Pay Attention To Gen Z’s Climate Demands by Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica. This largest and most influential consumer segment is emerging as the sustainable generation. Most young adults in Gen Z don’t have any tolerance for companies that make sustainability claims unless there is supporting data. They despise greenwashing. Gen Z wants corporate measures that illustrate carbon neutral impacts and are most likely to make purchase decisions based on personal, social, and environmental values.

46% of Gen Z had already changed or planned to change jobs or industries due to climate concerns in 2023.
54% of Gen Z prod their employers to start sustainability practices.
61% of Gen Z’s believe they have the power to drive change within their organizations.
62% of Gen Z shoppers prefer to buy from sustainable brands.
70% of Gen Zers support climate-smart agricultural practices.
73% are willing to pay more for sustainable products.
73% are extremely worried about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change.

This is a call to action for brands, governments, and all institutions: Gen Z doesn’t need empty promises — it needs to see real progress.

Journalism, Propaganda and Climate Change. Can we flood the zone with truth? By David Sassoon at Inside Climate Change (which he founded). We tend to celebrate the origins of American journalism (Founding Fathers, First Amendment, Fourth Estate) but ignore the genesis and development of America’s propaganda culture. Since the dawn of the 20^th century, it has been deeply interwoven into the fabric of our commerce and politics. The birth of public relations and its associated techniques of persuasion can be traced back to a man named Edward Bernays. He was, significantly, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and helped to popularize his uncle’s ideas in America. He also put them to work on behalf of government and corporations. His first major success was selling the public on U.S. entry into World War I, right after American voters had put Woodrow Wilson in the White House on a peace platform. In 1928, Bernays wrote a slim volume about the theory and technique of shaping public opinion. He didn’t call his book Public Relations. He called it, simply, Propaganda, a word which had yet to acquire its pernicious connotations. Here is his book’s first sentence: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” It’s hardly an ode to America’s democratic experiment, built around an educated citizenry that elects a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s more a manifesto that foreshadows the authoritarianism of the 1930s—Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao—and of the present era. We do not think much about what it means that publicists now outnumber journalists six to one.

We Study Climate Change. It Endangers You and Your Children by Solomon Hsiang and Marshall Burke at The New York Times. We study the effects of climate change on people. We know, from the best available science, that climate change will endanger the health and livelihood of most Americans alive today. After a long and sweeping review, the U.S. government came to a similar conclusion in 2009, when the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued a so-called endangerment finding — a move that signaled a high level of government confidence in the data it was reviewing. [...] The Trump administration this week took the first step to overturn the finding, by issuing a proposal that claims that the rule is scientifically and legally invalid, as well as unjustifiably costly. [...] A key element of the administration’s proposal is to redefine what it means for air pollution to cause harm. If a pollutant causes climate change, it would no longer count as hurting us. This runs counter to both basic logic and a growing mountain of science documenting direct harms from greenhouse gas emissions via climate change.

Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? by Bill McKibben at Mother Jones. Tara McDermott, who’s in charge of policy communications for a New York state solar developer called EmPower Solar, [told me]: “Our CEO went to southern Spain two years ago during all this, just staying with some friends at their house there. And they wanted solar, and he was the solar guy, so they asked him. They all went to the local store, something like Best Buy, and they picked the system he recommended and signed up, and by the time he left Spain two weeks later, it was already installed and running. This wasn’t DIY or under the radar. They did it legally. Imagine that world.” In many countries, people don’t have to imagine it. A million and a half Germans have installed “balcony solar”—they simply went to the big-box store, bought a giant panel for a few hundred euros, hung it from their apartment railing, and produced up to a quarter of their household’s power needs. Other European countries have followed suit. Ditto Australia, where Saul Griffith, author of the new book Plug In!, notes that permits can be had in a single day using a smartphone app—“the tradie [contractor] often does this for you. In Australia, it takes two or three days once you’ve made the decision to do it to get the system up and running.” But not in America, where President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are pulling out all the stops to destroy renewable power.

RELATED:

EU's pledge for $250 billion of U.S. energy imports is delusional by Clyde Russell at Reuters. Trump and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the deal for a 15% tariff on U.S. imports of EU goods at the U.S. leader's golf course in Scotland on Sunday. But more important than the 15% tariff rate was the apparent commitment by the EU to massively ramp up energy imports from the United States. The agreement calls for EU imports of U.S. energy, which currently are mainly crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), of $250 billion a year for three years. This is a delusional level of imports that the EU has virtually no chance of meeting, and one that U.S. producers would also struggle to supply. Even if the EU did manage somehow to boost its energy imports from the United States to the $250 billion a year mark, it would also prove massively disruptive for energy flows around the rest of the world. The numbers show the scale of the challenge.