In what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” the Environmental Protection Agency is repealing the “endangerment finding” made by Barack Obama’s EPA in 2009. That legal determination based on The Science™ says greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and four others, are pollutants, which then requires the federal government to regulate emissions of those gases under the 1963 Clean Air Act. Repealing that finding is certainly a huge and welcome rollback of climate policy.

Naturally, the climate alarmists — whom we often call ecofascists for their use of fear tactics to justify massive government intrusion in everyday life — are fit to be tied.

I’ll sum it up this way: Alarmists blame emissions for climate change, which they claim causes a seemingly never-ending parade of horribles from asthma to wildfires and from droughts to floods. Therefore, they reason, we must reduce emissions by every means necessary — preferably through heavy-handed government regulations. The pipe dream of “net zero” emissions is their goal because, to the climate cultists, this is existential.

That’s why Obama launched this overreach to classify gases we breathe alongside actual pollutants that cause harm. It’s why Joe Biden took it as far as essentially mandating electric vehicles. Donald Trump and his administration argue that repealing the finding will lead to deregulation savings of $1.3 trillion on everything from cars to energy.

“More energy drives human flourishing,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. “Energy abundance is the thing that we have to focus on, not regulating certain forms of energy out.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright added, “Our goal is to drive down the price of energy for Americans.”

Alarmists always counter that it’ll be vastly more expensive if we don’t submit to their prescribed regulations. We know how much regulations cost, but it takes an awful lot of faith in often disingenuous people to believe that Big Government rules generate any savings.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on this. Last July, when the Zeldin-led EPA announced its intention on this finding, our Thomas Gallatin wrote:

In the [George W. Bush-era] 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court considered the issue of whether the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act. The Court ruled 5-4 that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant,’” meaning the “EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases.” Tellingly, the Court noted that “policy judgments have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change and do not amount to a reasoned justification for declining to form a scientific judgment.” Instead, the Court said that the EPA had the authority to determine whether GHGs “cause or contribute to air pollution which may be reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, or whether the science is too uncertain to make a reasoned decision.”

That ruling means ecofascist groups already have lawsuit paperwork prepared to immediately challenge the Trump administration in court.

Team Trump wants them to bring it on. Part of the rationale for repealing the endangerment finding is to provoke a challenge that could get the Supreme Court, with its current 6-3 conservative majority, to overturn Massachusetts or at least allow this policy to move forward. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Clarence Thomas all dissented in the 2007 case, and several subsequent cases have undermined the legal framework of that ruling.

The Trump administration knows that a Democrat administration could reverse course without the Supreme Court’s help, though there could be another way.

The New York Times stumbled onto a novel concept that, under our constitutional system of three coequal branches, might just work: “A more definitive way to address the issue would be for Congress to weigh in. Democrats could pass legislation that defined greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, giving the E.P.A. the explicit authority to regulate them. Conversely, Republicans could enact legislation that said the opposite.”

Big if true.

Sarcasm aside, that’s exactly Team Trump’s strategy — to take back executive and legislative authority instead of ceding it to judges and left-wing activists.

The alarmists act as if Republicans want smoggy air and dirty water, as well as to suffocate kids and torment puppies. The only way to save the planet, they insist, is with the heavy hand of government. That’s slanderous fearmongering from a group of Chicken Littles whose cataclysmic prophecies have failed to materialize time after time.

Even The Washington Post’s editorial gets it, writing, “Free-market-driven innovation has done more to combat climate change than regulatory power grabs like the ‘endangerment finding’ ever did.”

There’s a bigger truth, though, as argued by columnist David Harsanyi: “The notion that man-made greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to humankind has been little more than a backdoor way to institute unpopular environmentalist policies and temper economic growth. It’s about time we end the scam.”

The Trump administration is moving that ball forward.

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