EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has proposed repealing the 2009 greenhouse gas “Endangerment Finding” that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. If successful, it unravels the legal predicate for the agency’s efforts to abolish gasoline-powered cars and outlaw fossil fuel energy plants.

Zeldin, explaining how the finding was based on obsolete data and misrepresented evidence on the impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, called the repeal the “most significant deregulatory action in U.S. history. There are people, who in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country.”

The Supreme Court opened the door to the Obama ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, a radical 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling in 2007 holding that required EPA to make a scientific determination as to whether greenhouse gases meet the definition of “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act of 1970.  This is something the law was never designed or intended to do.   The Bush administration kicked the can with an extended public comment period, and then left the fateful determination to the Obama administration to make.

The economic upside of yesterday’s announcement will (according to a compelling analysis published here as Appendix B) be greater than $1 trillion in present value, with annual GDP benefits of this deregulation of about $150 billion to $440 billion per year

We’ve seen in the last 15 years that carbon emissions in the U.S. have declined by some 20%, largely through innovation and shifts from coal to fracked natural gas. At the same time, China has gone into overdrive with its emissions, building an average of two large coal-fired plants a week. Kudos to Lee Zeldin for sending the “endangerment finding” to the scrapheap of history.