Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was going to reject the work it had done back in 2009, when it first determined that greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to the US public. While it laid out a number of reasons for revisiting its earlier work, one of those focused on the science: The EPA’s original decision was over 15 years old, and it claimed our understanding of climate change had itself changed since then. The National Academies of Science (NAS) decided that at least one aspect of that was probably right: Our understanding of the climate has changed in the last 15 years. So, it asked a group of scientists to do a quick update of our understanding of greenhouse gases, completed before public comment was closed on the EPA’s plan. That report is now out, and the NAS’s conclusion is clear: The EPA was right in 2019, and everything we’ve learned since has only made it more right. The politics of emissions The EPA’s endangerment finding already had a long history by the time it was completed during the Obama administration. In it, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases pose a risk to the US and its citizens, both directly through health impacts and indirectly through economic damages. Under the Clean Air Act, that finding enabled regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and formed the foundation of plans to reduce those originating from transportation and electrical generation. All of those plans have been held up in court or abandoned before coming into effect. The first Trump administration, rather than try to overturn a solid scientific analysis, attempted to implement toothless regulations. The second one, however, is far more ambitious and is attempting to reduce the threat of any future regulations by overturning the endangerment findings. It relied on a number of reasons to justify doing so.