Ignoring the math of climate chaos will cost us

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

You probably wouldn’t set $87 trillion on fire to save $1 trillion. But then again, you probably aren’t Administrator Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The now ironically named agency announced plans on Tuesday to renounce its 2009 finding that greenhouse-gas emissions are a danger to the public that need regulation. As I wrote earlier, this plan not only mocks established science, it also appears to be illegal, given the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA establishing the basis for this “endangerment finding,” along with Congress writing the idea into law several times in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

But we seem to live in an era of legal Calvinball, where laws and precedents are mere suggestions that can be changed as we go along. Zeldin has said as much about that Supreme Court ruling. And lawsuits over the EPA’s action might give Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dissent in that ruling, the chance to write a majority opinion overturning it.

So if we can’t appeal to law to stop this dangerous decision, then maybe we can appeal to math and economics. On a conservative podcast on Tuesday, Zeldin claimed doing away with the EPA’s endangerment finding was “an economic issue” and promised it would result in “over a trillion dollars in savings” by freeing companies from the shackles of regulation.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-ignoring-the-math-of-climate-chaos-will-cost-us/