For sixteen years, the United States government saw fit to regulate fossil fuel emissions as hazards to public health—using a so-called “endangerment finding” as judicial justification. Under this empirically grounded assessment of climate change as the driver of wildfires, hurricanes, crop failures, and pandemics, the Biden administration began to implement a host of moderate restrictions on fossil-fuel powered industries. They required coal-fired power plants to reduce their polluted wastewater discharge by 660 million pounds a year, tightened restrictions on the unsafe storage of coal ash, required a halving of vehicular emissions by 2032, and announced a national target of at least a sixty-one percent reduction in emissions by 2035. Now, a so-called “critical review” of climate policy issued by Trump’s EPA threatens to revoke the endangerment finding, jeopardizing not just Biden’s moderate reforms but our very ability to identify fossil fuel emissions as a hazard to the public.
Because global warming is near-universally recognized by the scientific community as a threat to human lives and safety, Trump’s EPA had to rely on faulty and manipulated data to justify their policy changes. The administration claim that ocean acidification should be called “ocean neutralization” and that concerns over its impact on invertebrates with sensitive calcium-carbonate exoskeletons have been “exaggerated.” In reality, the thirty percent decrease in oceanic pH that has occurred since the industrial revolution has compromised forty-three percent of subtropical coral habitats and decreased the exoskeletal density of Porites corals on the Great Barrier Reef by thirteen percent.