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EPA proposal Comments are due by Monday (9/22)
By Susan Saunders
Posted: 2025-09-21T13:04:39Z


By Jeffrey Bennett - Astronomer, Teacher & WriterView this email in your browserSept. 19, 2025

Dear Friends,


As a brief follow-up to my email of a month ago (repeated below with a few small updates), I strongly encourage all of you to submit a public comment on the EPA proposal to rescind the 2009 "endangerment" finding, which states that global warming poses a threat to "the public health and welfare of current and future generations." 


Comments are due by Monday (9/22) and are very easy to submit. There are several ways to submit (described here), but I think the easiest is as follows:

  • Send your comments in the form of an email to a-and-r-Docket@epa.gov.
  • For the Subject line, be sure to put: "Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194"

That's all there is to it. In terms of content, it is best if you formulate your own words, but you can feel free to adapt any of mine from below. You might also wish to reference the expert review mentioned in my first bullet below. For the conclusion of your comments, I would suggest some statement along the lines of: "The only reasonable conclusion is that the proposal to reconsider the Endangerment Finding should be rejected, as there is no reasonable doubt that the original finding is correct."


Note: For those who wish to make economic arguments, it's worth noting that the rest of the world is going to continue to move away from fossil fuels because the alternatives are not only cleaner but also cheaper (especially when you consider the costs to society that I detail in Chapter 4 of my global warming primer) and often easier to use. (E.g, solar panels can be installed even in places that lack a robust electrical grid.) The only thing that the Administration's policies are likely to do is to ensure that new energy sources are purchased from China and other countries rather than from the U.S.


Best wishes,


Jeff

PS. If you submit a public comment and are willing to share it with me, I'd love to see it.

_______________________________________________________________________


** From 8/18/25, with update ** 

You've probably heard that the Trump Administration seeks to rescind the EPA's "Endangerment Finding" that global warming poses a threat to "the public health and welfare of current and future generations." The stated rationale for this recision effort is a report from a newly formed "Climate Working Group." I decided to have a look at this report, which you can download for yourself from this Department of Energy link


I immediately noticed that their first major section (starting on p. 3) consists of nearly verbatim arguments (and the very same map) about a CO2-caused “greening of the Earth” that I previously addressed in a post I wrote in 2019 (https://medium.com/@JeffreyOBennett/debating-climate-science-d0bc09ffa339; scroll down to the heading The Greening of the Earth). The claims I debunked come from even earlier, so at least this part of the supposedly new report is actually just recycling old misinformation. 


That's only the beginning of a long list of misrepresentations, misleading statements, and outright falsehoods. Indeed, even non-experts can probably identify obvious instances of cherry picking and other invalid forms of data analysis in the report. If you want help in understanding the claims and why they don't hold water:

  • For a detailed analysis, read this expert review of the "Climate Working Group" report compiled by 85 outstanding climate scientists. This review goes into page-by-page detail to correct the record on virtually every misleading or false claim in the "Climate Working Group" report.
  • A similar debunking, but with a little less detail, can be found in this report from the outstanding Carbon Brief web site; this report identifies and discusses more than 100 false or misleading claims in the "Climate Working Group" report.  
  • For a more general overview of of these kinds of "skeptic" claims, you'll find nearly all of them discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of my book A Global Warming Primer — Pathway to a Post-Global Warming Future. Note 1: This book was recently named the 2024 Book of the Year for Ecology/Environment by the Foreward Indies award program. Note 2: The earlier (first) edition of this book is posted freely online at globalwarmingprimer.com/primer.

I'll leave it to you to explore more, but before I close it's worth a note about the authors of the new report, all five of whom seem to have done some good science in the past. Indeed, they are all surely smart enough to recognize the misleading nature of their claims, so it's natural to wonder why they would write and stand behind such disingenuous arguments. Some of my colleagues suspect that they must be on the payroll of fossil fuel interests, but the history of astronomy offers an alternative possible explanation. From about the 1960s to the 1980s, a handful of well-known astronomers (who had made some great discoveries) took contrarian positions on either or both of the Big Bang and the nature of quasars. At first, their positions seemed to be at least plausible, and as a result hundreds of other astronomers spent many years investigating their claims and looking for evidence that could resolve the debates. Over time, the evidence became quite clear, leading vitually all other astronomers to conclude that these particular contrarian claims were wrong. Yet most of those who had first proposed the claims never wavered in their beliefs, and their attempts to explain away new evidence became increasingly desperate and disingenuous. Why did they hold on when the evidence so clearly ruled against them? They don't appear to have had any financial or political motive. Rather, they were simply exhibiting a human frailty of being unwilling to admit error. It seems quite possible that the same may be the case for the authors of the new report. Incidentally, there have been many other famous examples of this same phenomenon, one of which is chronicled in a great new book that I'll highly recommend: The Martians, by David Baron


Finally, on the topic of Mars... The new "Perseverance Edition" of my book Max Goes to Mars published on Sept. 1. Please tell your friends with children, teachers, and others who may be interested. 


As always, please free to reply to this email and to share it with others; subscribe/unsubscribe options are below. 


Jeff

 

 


Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. — H.G. Wells


Jeff Bennett (jeff@bigkidscience.com)

Winner of the 2023 Klopsteg Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers

Personal web site: www.jeffreybennett.com

Books: www.bigkidscience.com/books


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