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EPA administrator Lee Zeldin defended his decision to axe an Obama-era rule that allowed the agency to regulate vehicles, airplanes and coal plants in order to combat climate change, vowing he won’t regulate “entire sectors of the economy” out of existence.
The “Endangerment Finding” published by former President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency found that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane and others threaten human life because they accelerate climate change. The EPA relied on the “endangerment finding” to install stringent regulations on a variety of industries, including auto, air travel and energy, that business leaders said threatened the viability of their companies.
Notably, the endangerment finding was part of the basis of the Biden administration’s so-called electric vehicle mandate which would have required over half of all cars sold to be EVs by 2032.
Zeldin announced that he was repealing the “holy grail of the climate change religion” during a speech at an Indianapolis auto dealership in July. He hailed the announcement as the “largest deregulatory announcement in US history,” and said he was ending over a decade of uncertainty for American automakers and consumers.
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Zeldin told CNN Sunday that when the rule was passed, the administrators relied on optimistic and pessimistic predictions surrounding the future effects of climate change, and that the pessimistic predictions did not pan out. He said that his decision was relying on “2025 facts rather than 2009 bad assumptions.” He also said the endangerment finding went beyond the EPA’s legal scope, by “filling in gaps” in the law and essentially legislating itself.
He said the agency couldn’t bend the law to meet its own goals, and that issues surrounding regulating “mobile sources” of pollution like cars would need to be handled by Congress. He accused the Obama-era bureaucrats of engaging in “mental leaps” in order to justify the endangerment finding.
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“I’m not going to get creative with the law, we’re going to read the plain language and if section 202 of the Clean Air Act gets amended by Congress, then we’ll follow that new law,” Zeldin said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Section 202 of the Clean Energy Act allows the EPA to regulate motor vehicles. Zeldin alleged that the endangerment finding went beyond the agency’s mandate to regulate vehicles as stipulated by the law. He accused the Biden administration of using the endangerment finding as an attempt to regulate the coal industry out of existence. When pressed by CNN host Kassie Hunt why he didn’t just leave the finding in place, Zeldin said he doesn’t get to “make up the law.”
“The power comes from the law, I don’t just get to make up the law… in order to make America the A.I. capital of the world, in order to unleash energy dominance, to protect jobs, to bring down energy costs, we are not going to regulate out of existence entire sectors of our economy,” Zeldin said.
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