The United States says that CO2 emissions are not harmful – climate science shows differently

The Trump administration is trying to end the ability of the United States government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by arguing that they do not constitute a danger to people. This is part of a strategy to reduce restrictions on power plants and vehicles, which the administration asserts slow economic growth. But this legal argument is weak in the light of the enormous body of climate science which clearly shows that the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases are a threat.

“It is a hazelnut argument and it does not hold,” said David Doniger to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environment defense group which plans to continue the administration for change.

The legal debate is based on a determination of 2009 by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which found greenhouse gases issued by power plants and vehicles in the United States poses a danger to people. Known as “conclusion of endangerment”, the rule gives the agency the power to regulate these emissions, which represent together about half of the American total. The rules implemented since then have contributed to reducing the emissions of cars and trucks, which made them more economical in fuel and constituted a significant part of the efforts of previous administrations to reduce the emissions of power plants.

On July 29, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced that the agency would seek to repeal the conclusion of endangering, describing the decision of “the greatest deregulating action in the history of the United States”. However, before this change could come into force, the agency must publicly explain the decision, as well as defend it in the proceedings already being prepared.

In a project of the new rule, the EPA clearly indicates that its justification will partly depend on the argument of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do not represent a sufficiently significant danger for people to justify the reduction of emissions. This goes against the fundamental conclusions drawn by climate science organizations such as the intergovernmental panel on climate change, as well as several national American climate and EPA assessments itself, which in 2009 found evidence that greenhouse gases endangering people were “strong and clear”.

“I think they are trying to throw all the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks,” explains Doniger. “They come with old theories and new theories. They are all quite fragile. ”

The evidence that greenhouse gases endanger health have only been strengthened in recent decades, according to a 2018 study which has re -evaluated the justification for endangering 10 years later. Today, climatologists have even more proven tools to determine whether climate change has had an impact on an extreme particular event. They can even connect greenhouse gas emissions from a particular source to damage from a particular extreme heat event.

In order to challenge this vision of consensus, the EPA rule rests strongly on the conclusions of a project of report produced by the Ministry of Energy and released in parallel. The 151-page report, written by five well-known skeptics of traditional climate science, recognizes that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that leads to global warming, but it doubts how it will be damaging to the United States, and discusses the advantages of more CO2 in the air, as its effect of fertilization on plants.

While many of the individual parts of the report are closely true and supported by climate science, other researchers say that the report is fatally defective, because it does not manage to approach research which does not support its global conclusions. For example, although it is real levels of increased growth of the CO2 factory, the report does not mention that the increase in temperatures should overwhelm this effect, with harmful consequences for agriculture and ecosystems.

“They spend data to find the few examples that support their story while systematically ignoring the much more important evidence that contradicts it,” explains Andrew Dessler to Texas A&M University.

“I am a little surprised that the government has published something like that as an official publication,” said Zeke Hausfather in Berkeley Earth, non -profit research in California. “It reads as a blog post – a somewhat dispersed collection of often degraded skeptical claims, studies taken out of context or examples selected by Cerise which are not representative of wider climate science research results.”

Hausfather, which is quoted several times in the Doe report, calls it a “farce”, claiming that it would not pass any process of revision of standard peers. He contrasts the production process of this report, written by five authors over several months, with the national climate assessment which was being written over the years by hundreds of authors, who have all been recently dismissed by the Trump administration.

“This notion that there is no societal cost for these programs is a completely fallacious and tired argument,” explains Justin Mankin at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. In 2025, after the two warmest years ever recorded and the extremes associated, “what is clearly clear is that the impacts of global warming are much more important than what we understood in 2009,” he said.