Conservatives intent on reversing the Obama administration’s climate-change legacy are angry that EPA chief Scott Pruitt hasn’t gone further. They’d like to see him try to reverse the “endangerment finding” that provides the legal framework for the Clean Power Plan and other climate-change policies.
The finding dates back to a “2009 determination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health and security, a ruling that serves as the foundation for the EPA’s efforts to curb climate-damaging emissions and that affects its governing of everything from automobile exhaust to power plants to refrigerators,” says ProPublica.
Pruitt has said to the White House and Congress that he won’t challenge the rule, because it has already been upheld in the courts and would most likely be so again, says The New York Times. But conservatives like Steven J. Milloy, who is in charge of the website JunkScience.com, which rejects the idea of human-made climate change, are unhappy with Pruitt’s decision.
“The endangerment finding must be redone or all of this is for naught,” said Milloy. “If you get rid of the endangerment finding, the rest of the climate regulations just sweep themselves away. But if they don’t get rid of it, the environmentalists can sue, and then there’s going to have to be a Trump Clean Power Plan.”