Obama-era radicals about to lose their environmental religion

OPINION:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has announced a pathway to put an end to a Barack Obama-era environmental provision called the “endangerment finding,” a provision that handed radical leftists a tool — a “holy grail of the climate change religion,” as Zeldin called it — to control emission levels on everything from chemical plants to utility companies to cars.

This is a massive win for the American people. Make way for the building, the growing, the producing; the return to national exceptionalism.

Team Obama in 2009 had signed into place this so-called endangerment finding that labeled, among other gases, carbon dioxide a pollutant and that placed strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions, all based on faulty, even fabricated, science.

Team Joe Biden from January 2021 through January 2025 took that endangerment finding and foisted upon American producers and consumers millions upon millions, nay, more than a trillion of dollars worth of costly regulatory and compliance controls, all based on faulty, even fabricated, science.

And now Team Donald Trump in July of 2025 is taking steps to return the country to a place of sanity — and truthful science. Carbon dioxide is, after all, necessary for life; it’s what humans emit during the breathing process, for crying out loud. But Democrats only like science when they can warp science for their own purposes.

From The Heartland Institute: “The rule, which treated carbon dioxide as a pollutant akin to smoke and soot, [made it possible for EPA to] continually [ratchet] up regulations that [would have led] to a near future in which gasoline-powered cars and any fossil fuel power plants were outlawed.”

In effect, the endangerment finding was a limitless power for environmentalists.

Or, as Zeldin said, it was the “holy grail of the climate change religion,” used widely by both Obama and Biden EPA officials to exert controls. 

“[They] twisted the law, ignored precedent and warped science to achieve their preferred ends and stick American families with hundreds of billions of dollars in hidden taxes every single year,” Zeldin said, in a statement.

It was the provision that led to the widely hated stop-start button on vehicles, for instance.

It was the rule that led to costly compliance mandates for American businesses, for example.

Talk about a catch-all control. 

“Basically,” said Linnea Lueken, a research fellow for the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, “the endangerment finding gave unaccountable government agencies the ability to have a say over whatever they wanted, since every human activity results in the production of carbon dioxide.”

How nice for the bureaucrats.

And now: boo-hoo to these same bureaucrats. 

They’re crying about the soon-to-come environmental hazards that will result from the unwinding of this vicious rule; they’re warning about the end of Earth as we know it, and the burning of the globe and the destruction of the world.

What they really hate is the idea of President Trump ushering in a season of American Exceptionalism and growth and productivity and prosperity. What they truly detest is a country filled with citizens who are able to exercise entrepreneurial talents so as to provide for themselves and their own families — without the need for government intervention; without the need for government redistribution of resources. What they utterly fear is the loss of control.

But placing so much power in the hands of a single bureaucratic agency is never a good idea — and that holds true for a Republican-controlled administration, as well as a Democrat-run one. Environmentalism only makes sense when it truly keeps the earth clean for future generations to enjoy, and not when it flows out of politicized and weaponized science as a means of consolidating power and profit in the hands of the few, the select, the elite — and the Democrat.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.