Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its final rule to repeal a more than decade-old decision known as the “endangerment finding,” which legally concludes that greenhouse gas emissions threaten human health and welfare by causing climate change. The final repeal does not challenge the medical research, which firmly establishes that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health, but instead questions its own authority to limit carbon pollution, which has been granted by Congress and affirmed by the Supreme Court.
In response to this rule, Dr. Rev. Jessica Moerman, EEN’s President and CEO, released the following statement.
“As evangelicals committed to defending the sanctity of life, we believe that pollution must be addressed because it harms human life.
“On the Endangerment Finding, we welcome the EPA’s tacit acknowledgement that the evidence that carbon pollution poses a direct threat to human life is robust and difficult to dismiss. The Clean Air Act is clear: any revisions must be based on new evidence, which the EPA has failed to provide. As such, we believe this effort will ultimately fail in court, wasting taxpayer dollars and distracting from the real issue at hand–advancing American-made solutions to climate pollution.
“Ultimately, Congress should establish a legislative framework for carbon policy, but until such a time, the Clean Air Act’s modest provisions, which focus on readily deployable and already in-use technologies that cut pollution, support important innovations that should not be withheld from the American people.
“We need conservative solutions, ideas, and legal frameworks to address the scale of the challenges we face, but unfortunately that’s not what the EPA delivered today. American workers and made-in-America innovation is needed to secure a low-pollution future. As Europe and China race ahead as the leaders of the low-pollution technologies of the future and impose their own carbon standards that other countries (including the United States) must meet to compete in the global marketplace, today’s move by the EPA puts America and its strengths at a competitive disadvantage.”
