Climate Policy Belongs to Congress—Not the EPA

Just recently, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would rescind its 2009 “Endangerment Finding” — the legal cornerstone of more than a decade of federal climate regulation, including electric-vehicle mandates and sweeping carbon-dioxide regulations affecting major sectors of the American economy.

Predictably, the reaction has focused on climate science. Supporters of the Endangerment Finding argue that global warming is real and urgent. Critics dispute the severity of the threat.

But that debate, however important, misses a more fundamental question: In America, who decides?

Even if one believes climate change poses serious risks, it does not follow that the unelected regulators at the EPA may reshape the American economy on their own. Ours is a constitutional republic. Major national policy decisions — especially those carrying vast economic and political consequences — belong to Congress.

The 2009 Endangerment Finding transformed the Clean Air Act, a statute designed to address localized air pollution like smog and particulates, into a vehicle for nationwide climate regulation. From that single administrative determination flowed mandates affecting automobiles, power plants, manufacturing, energy production and more.

One Supreme Court decision is often relied upon by proponents of sweeping agency regulation: the Court’s 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA. But that decision did not authorize an end-run around Congress. The Court held only that greenhouse gases could fit within the Act’s broad definition of “air pollutant” and that EPA had to give a reasoned explanation for whatever its decisions might be on that score. It did not order the agency to affirmatively find that greenhouse gases endanger public health. And it certainly did not authorize the EPA to restructure the nation’s energy and transportation sectors.

Yet that is effectively what happened.

Over time, the Endangerment Finding became the predicate for sweeping regulatory programs that Congress itself had repeatedly declined to enact. Lawmakers debated cap-and-trade proposals and other comprehensive climate legislation — and chose not to enact them. Those legislative choices matter.

Under our constitutional structure, when Congress decides not to act, an agency may not step into the vacuum and act anyway.

More recent Supreme Court decisions have reinforced this principle. In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court explained that agencies cannot decide issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court rejected the judicial practice of reflexively deferring to agencies’ expansive interpretations of their own authority in the face of Congress’s silence or supposed ambiguity.

In plain terms: regulators do not get to discover sweeping new powers in decades-old laws.

That is why rescinding the Endangerment Finding is not an attack on science. It is a restoration of constitutional order.

Climate policy — like energy policy or health care policy — involves tradeoffs. It affects prices, jobs, consumer choice, and national competitiveness. Americans may reasonably disagree about how aggressively the country should seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But those disagreements must be resolved through legislation, debate, and elections — not through administrative improvisation.

There is also a practical dimension. Regulations built on the Endangerment Finding have imposed substantial costs on manufacturers and consumers. Whether one supports or opposes those policies, decisions of that magnitude should be made by elected representatives who answer to voters, not unelected bureaucrats.

If Congress wishes to enact a comprehensive climate regime, then that is a decision for Congress to make. It can draft precise standards, weigh economic consequences, and make explicit policy judgments. Agencies cannot treat Congress’s decision not to act as a blank check to act on their own.

The genius of the American system is not that it guarantees perfect policy outcomes. It is that it assigns responsibility clearly. Lawmaking power rests with Congress. Executive agencies execute the law as written. Regulators do not possess independent lawmaking power.

The 2009 Endangerment Finding blurred that line. Its rescission clarifies it. And if Americans disagree with the direction of national climate policy, the Constitution makes clear where that debate belongs: in Congress.