EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin: If You Want Greenhouse Gas Regulation, Congress Has To Pass A Bill | Video
- Politic
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- 5 minutes read
EPA Director Lee Zeldin told Politico at a Munich Security Conference event this week how the reversal of the EPA’s 2009 Carbon “endangerment finding” changes how the federal government interprets the Clean Air Act with regard to greenhouse gas emissions. Read more:
“Where in Section 202 of the Clean Air Act does it say anything about global climate change?” Weldin said. “In 2009, President Obama and his allies in Congress, they tried to put together the votes to amend the Clean Air Act. They weren’t able to get the votes and they said, you know what, we’re gonna do it anyway.”
EPA ADMINISTRATOR LEE ZELDIN: So I shouldn’t follow the law?
DASHA BURNS, POLITICO: I’m saying that there are many examples of this administration in gray areas of the law.
EPA ADMINISTRATOR LEE ZELDIN: But you’re asking about the endangerment finding, and I’m sitting here as the EPA administrator, and I’m happy to answer any question that you have.
I committed when I was going through the confirmation process that I’m gonna follow the law, and there’s no way that I’m gonna sit here and have any apology or regret for applying the best reading of the law and and reading a Supreme Court decision that makes it clear that if you’re going to regulate the heck out of greenhouse gas emissions with trillions of dollars of regulatory costs on Americans, that’s something that Congress should have a debate and a vote on.
And every time you see any member of Congress who wants to grandstand and complain and cry about the decision, the announcement that we made two days ago, well, why don’t you do your damn job? You’re a senator, you’re a congressman, try to amend the Clean Air Act.
Ask them, where in Section 202 of the Clean Air Act does it say anything about global climate change?
Why don’t you ask them why and when they did this in 2009, did they not study each of these individual well-mixed gasses individually?
Ask them why did they use well-mixed gasses that aren’t even emitted from vehicles, even though it was an endangerment finding on mobile sources.
Ask them why, why do you include water vapor, if you’re going to go there?
Why didn’t you look at local and regional impacts, which is what the EPA and Clean Air Act had been applied for 50 years.
My job is to follow the law. And I will very proudly defend a decision as based on what is in fact indisputably the best reading of the law.
And guess what?
Here’s the best part. If Congress wants to change the law, they want to change Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, and they want to tell me that I’m supposed to regulate the heck out of greenhouse gasses, guess what? Then we’ll do it. But that’s not what happened.
So in 2009, President Obama and his allies in Congress, they tried to put together the votes to amend the Clean Air Act.
They weren’t able to get the votes and they said, you know what, we’re gonna do it anyway.
President Trump was sworn into office January of 2025. On day one, he had me, he signed an executive order giving me 30 days to complete the research, the vetting, provide a recommendation as it relates to the endangerment finding.
I read the Supreme Court precedent.
I read Section 202 of the Clean Air Act with our team, and there’s only one best reading of the Clean Air Act.
And, in so many different ways, the many mental leaps, that were done in the 2009 endangerment finding violated that.
