Two key Trump administration agencies, the EPA and NASA, are bringing scientific, socio-economic and national security sanity to overcome unwarranted climate hysteria essential to meet our nation’s growing energy lifeblood needs.
EPA proposes to rescind the Obama administration EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding and repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines established under the Clean Air Act (CAA) since 2010.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has announced that the agency will “move aside” from climate and earth science to solely refocus its attention on space exploration amid prevalent expectations that funding many current climate satellite and modeling programs will be terminated or reduced.
EPA Abandons CO2 ‘Pollution’ Mythology:
The Trump EPA under Administrator Lee Zeldin asserts that CAA Section 202(a) does not authorize the agency to regulate GHG emissions (primarily harmless and beneficial carbon dioxide) as an air pollutant based on global climate concerns.
A 2007 landmark 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court case — Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, 549 U.S. 497 (2007) — held that GHGs fit within CAA’s definition of an “air pollutant” as including any physical substance that is “emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air,” but was ambiguous regarding EPA’s statutory authority to regulate emissions from motor vehicles.
Notably, none of the five majority justices continue to serve on the court, while three of the four dissenters remain.
The agency also asserts that Congress did not clearly authorize it to regulate motor vehicle emissions as a response to climate change, and further that there is no technology capable of having a measurable impact on climate-based harms.
On June 30, the same day that Zeldin announced the Reconsideration of Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards’ proposal to the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright released a related report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.”
Making good on its plan, on Aug. 1, 2025, the agency published a proposal to repeal GHG tailpipe emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines from model year 2012 and beyond.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, Congress moved to rescind three Biden Administration waivers granted to California under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).
This marked the most significant challenge to California’s long-standing authority to set its own vehicle emission standards — an authority rooted in the Air Quality Act of 1967, which predates the modern CAA.
As Administrator Zeldin has enthusiastically declared, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more.”
NASA Gets Out of Climate Alarm Politics:
NASA was co-opted as a major contributor to climate hysteria from the time James Hansen, director of its Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), a small climate modeling shop in a Manhattan office building, first gained global attention in 1988 following his star witness testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space.
Hansen stated with 99% certainty that temperatures had increased and that there had been some greenhouse warming, although he then made no direct connection between the two.
Over time, Hansen’s pronouncements became ever more dramatic.
In a Dec. 6, 2005, presentation to the American Geophysical Union he declared that the Earth’s climate was already reaching a tipping point that will result in the loss of Arctic ice as we know it, with sea levels rising as much as 80 feet during this century, thus flooding coastal areas.
He warned that this could be halted only if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced within the next 25 years.
Hansen was subsequently arrested three times in climate protests while holding that NASA position, yet he was never fired.
In 2011, Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency’s climate science programs.
An April 10 letter admonished the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that called the theory into question.
As Gavin Schmidt who succeeded Hansen as GISS director told the renowned journal Science in 2021, “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission” that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument because “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary — and wrong.”
After all, if GISS candidly admits that it can’t be trusted to predict the future of climate, why should NASA allow such irrelevant non-predictions to influence budgets allotted to future human expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond?
Good cheer was shared among many very competent climate scientists upon hearing that Acting NASA Administrator Duffy, who also heads DOT, told Fox Business, “All the climate science and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA we’re going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA.”
“That’s why we have NASA — to explore, not to do all of these earth sciences,” he appropriately added.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell’s Reports — More Here.
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