Trump administration to make climate change denialism official policy
By 
The Anne Gorsuch posthumous revenge tour continues:
The Trump administration is planning this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, according to U.S. officials, in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.
The reversal targets the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which concluded that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The finding provided the legal underpinning for the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules, which limited emissions from power plants and tightened fuel-economy standards for vehicles under the Clean Air Act.
“This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an interview.
The final rule, set to be made public later this week, removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify and comply with federal greenhouse-gas emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
It wouldn’t apply to rules governing emissions from power plants and other stationary sources such as oil-and-gas facilities, the officials said. But repealing the finding could open up the door to rolling back regulations that affect those facilities.
The move is likely to be seen as a victory for the fossil-fuel industry, which for years has pushed back against federal climate regulations. Since taking office, President Trump has sought to repeal rules that his allies in the oil-and-gas industry have cited as overly burdensome. Trump has framed fossil fuels as vital to economic and national security, and he has argued that expanded reliance on them will help lower energy prices.
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Officials said the rollback would equate to more than $1 trillion in regulation cuts, though they didn’t provide details on how they came up with the number. They said that rescinding the finding would result in an average per-vehicle cost savings of more than $2,400. Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year.
Of the last two claims, one of them is certainly credible.
It’s bad enough that this is happening, but what’s worse is that the MAGA judiciary will make it enormously difficult for a future Democratic administration to restore the policy. The post-Chevron world will be a one-way ratchet.