EPA Rescinds Obama-era Climate Finding: Energy Experts React

Welcome back. I'm Tiffany Meyer. President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin today announced the elimination of a 2009 decision that served as the basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The decision, known as the endangerment finding, was established under the Obama administration and declared that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to public health and contribute to climate change. Regulations based on that finding include oil and gas. Joining us now to discuss the repeal of this finding are two fantastic guests, former Trump EPA transition team member Steve Malloy. He's currently a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. We're also joined by former Energy Department official Bart McCloys. He's the president of McCloys Partners International Corporation. Thank you both so much for being here. Steve, starting with you, how significant of a move is this revoking the 2009 endangerment finding? You cannot overstate its significance. President Trump positioned this as the greatest deregulatory measure ever. I mean, that's true. Getting rid of this thing, if it holds in courts, will create trillions and trillions of dollars of benefits for this country, save us from the national security peril we are now in with China, where we've outsourced our energy economy to communist China in large part. So this is just, it's a magnificent move. It's long past due. Now we have to defend it in court. And Bart, your reaction to the move and the impact of this? Steve's absolutely right. And it's important that he mentioned China, because this finding underpinned the entire climate change agenda. It underpinned a switch from calling it global warming to calling it climate change, and to going to the Green New Deal and green power generation. And it was a huge wet sloppy kiss to the Chinese Communist Party, because everything that stemmed from this decision, the whole climate change economy of moving toward wind power and solar power and other alternative energies, and what do you call it, flow batteries, all of those things were manufactured in China. None of them were manufactured in the United States. And it went away from coal, gas, and oil that the United States has been blessed with in abundance. And because it found, the EPA administrator made a finding that these gases endangered human health, it gave the government enormous power, frightful power to regulate every aspect of American life. There's a lot to unpack here. Steve, first, though, how could this play out in a state like California? And how will those changes trickle across the nation more broadly? Well, California is its own problem. The problem with California is that they tried to issue standards that they could nationalize. That has failed because with the EV mandate, for example, California wanted to nationalize that, President Trump and Congress ended that possibility. So California is always going to be crazy as long as it's run by Democrats. This is not really going to affect that. This is going to affect the rest of us. California has the highest gas prices, the highest energy prices. It's a lost cause as far as I'm concerned, but the rest of us are not. And so this will lower energy prices. This immediate rule will lower car prices, lower gas prices. It will allow for consumers to have more money that they could spend however they choose. The opportunity costs of climate change are going to be gained, not lost. So this is just a fantastic rule all around. And speaking of the rest of us, Bart, what are the immediate impacts we could see from this? Which industries will see the biggest changes? Well, I think you're also going to see not just car prices lowered, but you're going to see state emission standards changed. And you're not going to have older cars be kicked out of service so early anymore. You're going to see people able to hold on to their cars for a much longer period of time. And that's especially important for people who live at the bottom end of the economic scale. When I was a struggling teenager and working my way through college, I depended on being able to buy literally a car for $100, a car for $300. I wouldn't be allowed to drive a car like that today. It could never pass the emission standards. And as far as other industries, the cement industry, the trucking industry, anything that depends on automotive things, anything that is carbon intensive, nearly every industry in America is going to feel an enormous weight lifted from their shoulders and released. I mean, it's like they've been trying to swim with bags of concrete tied to their wrists and their ankles. And Steve, the president of the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund said this action will only lead to more of this pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harms for American families. Your response to that? Yeah, first off, greenhouse gas emissions are not pollution. They're colorless, odorless. Carbon dioxide itself is plant food, essential for feeding the 8 billion people we have on the planet. Gas prices will come down, car prices will come down. The average age of a car on the road today is 12 years. In the 70s, it was five years. If people turn over their cars more often, car prices will come down. It should be better for the economy. And plus, there's construction equipment will be cheaper, it will work better. Truckers, they were coming after truckers. Truck costs are going to remain low. So I mean, this rule is just going to help our economy work. Think back to the Biden climate rules and the inflation they caused, and the destruction in our economy that happened then. And Bart, talk to us about the financial aspect here. What are the expected savings as a result of this move? How much can Americans expect to save? Oh, I can't even calculate it because every single thing that we purchase has been made more expensive by this rule. And I want to just point out, if I may, the awesome in the old sense of the word, the frightening power that an unelected bureaucrat has. This finding, this rule was not made by the Congress. It wasn't made by the president in an executive order. It was a finding signed by the EPA administrator. And I'll bet you, nobody but Steve or me can tell you even the name of that EPA administrator. And I'll confess, I had to look it up because I couldn't remember. It was Lisa Jackson. Nobody even remembers her. But she signed this finding into law. And this little thing, just saying we find that these six gases endanger human health, created a trillion-dollar break or weight on the economy. Every single thing, housing costs, everything you can imagine, was made more expensive because we're sitting here trying to regulate carbon dioxide, which, as Steve pointed out, is a plant food. It's necessary for life. It's part of the green revolution. And as carbon dioxide levels have increased over the past decades, you've seen the greening of the world increase. I flew over North Africa, I don't know, two years, three years ago, when I was there as an election observer. And I was shocked at the green I saw in the North African desert that used to be completely brown. And there were spots of green where there never were before. These are not pollutants. And the other benefit of this is there are going to be lawsuits about this. The left will sue immediately. And I'll bet you dollars to donuts that that 2007 Supreme Court decision gets reviewed and is overturned and reinterpreted. So even those series of lawsuits, I expect, will redound to the benefit of American citizens. And Steve, I want to go to your earlier point, because China has benefited from this push for so-called renewable energy technology, especially dominating that sector. What does revoking this policy mean for the Chinese Communist Party? Well, this is bad news for them, because their plan to disable our economy and our national security was to sell us wind and solar. Not only are they essentially the exclusive manufacturers of that, they also sabotage that, along with utility scale batteries. There were batteries that had to be taken out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, a marine base, because they had been sabotaged by communist China. Communist China was soft. Green energy was soft power to just cripple our national security, cripple our economy. We still have a long way to go. We're still very vulnerable to communist China. But this is a step in the right direction. Invite your thoughts on that. Yeah. And what I get, I'm sitting here fuming, because as Steve was saying, that I was thinking of Joe Biden binding us ever more tightly to the Chinese yoke of slavery that they tried to put on us. And I think of the spying technology that the Chinese put into everything. We have been at war with communist China for the past 15 or 20 years. We just don't know it yet. In every possible way, they were trying to constrict us, to circumvent us, and to trammel us in a cage of their making. And we've now burst loose from it. Bart McCoy, Steve Malloy, thank you both so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thank you.