Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin is defending his agency’s repeal of an Obama-era rule to fight climate change through strictly regulating entire sectors of the economy.
Zeldin told CNN on Sunday that the Obama administration’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” claimed that greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide threaten human life because they are alleged to accelerate climate change.
The EPA then used that finding to create stringent regulations on a variety of industries including energy, automobiles and travel as well as for the basis of the Biden administration’s electric vehicle (EV) mandate requiring over half of all cars sold by 2023 to be EVs.
In July, Zeldin made what he called the “largest deregulatory announcement in US history” that he would be repealing the “holy grail of the climate change religion.”
Zeldin told CNN that when the Endangerment Finding rule was passed, EPA administrators were relying on pessimistic predictions regarding future climate change that did not pan out and that his decision relied on “2025 facts rather than 2009 bad assumptions.”
According to Zeldin, the endangerment finding went beyond the EPA’s legal authority and allowed the agency to essentially legislate by “filling in gaps” in the law.
When CNN host Kasie Hunt pushed back and asked Zeldin if the federal government should “combat climate change,” he responded that the agency cannot bend the law to meet its own goals and provided Hunt with a quick civics lesson.
When asked by CNN why he didn’t just leave the finding in place, Zeldin responded that he “doesn’t get to make up the law.”
Section 202 of the Clean Energy Act allows the EPA to regulate motor vehicles, but Zeldin said the Biden administration tried to use the endangerment finding to regulate the coal industry out of business.
Zeldin told CNN, “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.”