INTERVIEW: Climate Policy Endangerment with Marlo Lewis, Jr.

A veteran climate policy skeptic explains his take on Obama, Trump, and the EPA

The following is a lightly edited interview transcript from Episode 154 of the Free the Economy podcast. The full audio episode is here (interview starts ~9:30). The video version of our in-studio conversation is here.

I recently had the opportunity to interview my longtime Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Marlo Lewis, Jr., about new developments in climate policy, and we covered a lot of interesting territory. We focused in particular on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” the policy originally adopted in 2009 under the Obama Administration which declared that greenhouse gases emissions, particularly those from motor vehicles, endanger human health and should be more strictly regulated. This action paved the way for significant further climate policy over the next fifteen-plus years. The endangerment finding in now in the process of being rescinded under current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Marlo and I get into that in detail.

Marlo brought a long history of expertise to this topic. He’s been challenging shoddy science and poorly reasoned policy proposals in the environmental and climate space for decades. Back when former Vice President Al Gore was dominating headlines with his documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth, for example, Marlo wrote the 154-page working paper “Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth,” taking an issue with many of Gore’s claims. He and I even filmed a video response to Gore’s famous appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show all the way back in 2006 (the vintage YouTube production values of our effort are still intact).

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TRANSCRIPT BEGINS

Richard Morrison: Now, I’d like to welcome to the show my friend and longtime colleague, Marlo Lewis, Jr., senior fellow here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Welcome to Free the Economy, Marlo.

Marlo Lewis: Thank you so much, Richard. It’s really a pleasure that I’m looking forward to.

Richard Morrison: You’ve been researching and writing about climate change and environment policy for a long time, so I’m excited to dive into this with you. It’s a fascinating subtopic in the world of climate and the environment that I think a lot of people probably don’t know very much about. But it is an important issue. We’ll start with the Environmental Protection Agency which, back in 2009, adopted something that has come to be known as the endangerment finding.

That has to do with greenhouse gases and the relation to public health. And that document and the doctrine that has come to be based on it has informed a lot of subsequent environmental policy in the United States. So, we’re here to talk about that. But to start with, take us back to 2009. Way back to those olden times. And tell us how the how this came about, the endangerment finding, what was EPA thinking at the time.

Marlo Lewis: Right. Well, it came about from Massachusetts v. EPA. Which was a Supreme Court case that was decided in April of 2007, which was itself part two of, ongoing litigation, at least before courts, because there was a 2005 Massachusetts v. EPA decision which ruled in favor of the of the Bush administration, EPA and said that no, EPA did not have to, make a judgment as to whether or not greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution, which may reasonably be, anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.

But that was appealed. And then it went to the Supreme Court in 2006, and they made their decision in 2007. And actually, the whole thing had started as a petition by a bunch of environmental groups back in 1999. And I went back and looked at that petition recently. And what one of the curious things that I saw in it was that the petitioners actually looked forward to a time when the EPA could use emission standards to force automakers to produce electric vehicles, which is where it all ended up. Finally, under the Biden administration [the administration enacted a de facto electric vehicle mandate on auto manufacturers], all based on that original endangerment finding from 2009.

The Supreme Court said basically that the EPA had to make a determination about the dangerousness of these emissions unless it could show that the scientific uncertainty was so great they couldn’t make a judgment. And so this all started during the waning years of the Bush administration and, the Bush administration put out what’s called an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which just laid out the whole issue of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act because it had never been done before.

And they reviewed various options for doing that and potential consequences for public policy of making an affirmative determination. But then the Obama administration picked up that baton and began making plans to find endangerment, which they did in December of 2009. And then that compelled the EPA once it had found endangerment, to start setting greenhouse gas motor vehicle standards for new cars and light trucks.

And so that’s how this all started. And then there have been several, subsequent greenhouse gas emission standard regulations by the EPA, culminating in the April 2024 standards of the Biden administration, which effectively require that 70% of all new motor vehicles sold in the United States be electric vehicles by the year 2032 and Congress and the Trump and President Trump overturned what’s called the waiver. That’s the permission that the Biden administration gave to the EPA two years before that, for California to adopt a 100%, electric vehicle mandate, for 2035. So, there’s been a lot of motion in the field in the last two years.

Richard Morrison: I think one of the things that maybe confuses the average person is that they hear about, you know, air pollution and the Clean Air Act. And it’s the difference between traditional air pollutants, which the Clean Air Act was passed to regulate – the dirty air that comes out of tailpipes that makes you sick, things like sulfur dioxide, the smelly bad stuff – and greenhouse gases, with includes things like carbon dioxide which are odorless and colorless and are not hazardous to us, which we exhale all the time. And I have my pet theory that climate activists have, since the very beginning, have tried to lead the average person to think that greenhouse gases are the same as noxious pollution, gases that come out of smokestacks and tailpipes and things like that when they refer to you know, “global warming pollution,” even though most of what they call global warming pollution is literally just carbon dioxide.

So that sort of, I think, informs this idea that the EPA’s endangerment finding wasn’t just that normal air pollutants can be health hazards, which we already have 50 years of law and policy on that. But the idea that otherwise harmless gases are now being treated as if they were the equivalent of, like, sulfur dioxide.

Marlo Lewis: That’s absolutely, absolutely true. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand, and it’s been very effective, in spite of the fact that catalytic converters were invented for the specific purpose of ensuring that automobile engines combust so efficiently, that the only thing that comes out of a tailpipe are two greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and water vapor. And so carbon dioxide had to be demonized as dirty.

So, you get this rhetorical framing of dirty energy being applied to anything that emits carbon dioxide when carbon dioxide has actually been used at, say, in hospitals as a disinfection agent. It can be a cleaning agent. And of course, we all love it in our bubbly drinks. And there would be no life on Earth except maybe some primitive, unicellular, plants or spores or something if it weren’t for carbon dioxide.

Because we all know that plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis to construct their tissues. And of course, if there are no plants, then there is no food for the herbivores, or for the omnivores like us and, also, no, basically no habitat for any complex animal life on Earth. So it’s the case that you can have too much of a good thing. Okay, let’s grant that.

But carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is a normal natural constituent of clean air. And in its higher levels has many positive benefits, both for agriculture – it makes crops grow bigger, faster – and also for just the general ecology we often hear of it referred to accurately as the greening of the Earth. There’s been a tremendous expansion in vegetative leaf cover of the planet. It’s basically the equivalent of the entire continental United States just in the last few decades, because plants have more to ingest.

Richard Morrison: They’re thriving with higher CO2 levels. You laid out that long bureaucratic process by which we went from environmental groups wanting the government to regulate greenhouse gases. And then lawsuits and then the EPA under George W. Bush changed to the EPA under Obama and then they had more aggressive, EPA regulations rolled out over the years, finally bringing us up to more or less the current time. The Trump administration, with the current EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, is now in the process of rolling back a lot of that, including the endangerment finding itself. And so you point out that this is kind of a big load bearing move that’s potentially more significant than the rollbacks of a lot of these other individual one off rules, because so much is built on top of it.

You wrote, I’ll just quote a recent blog post you wrote, which is excellent: “Repealing the endangerment finding will scrap the foundational legal and scientific justifications for the entire climate regulatory complex put in place by the Obama and Biden administration’s, and that a future progressive administration would have to reinstate the endangerment finding before it could, for example, make credible emission reductions pledges under the Paris climate agreement.”

Richard Morrison: If a future administration, that is, were to rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which, of course, we’ve twice now left under President Trump. So, when we look at environmental policy reform and the significant changes we’re seeing in climate policy at the national level, should this this change, this endangerment finding, repealing that, should that be like job number one?

Marlo Lewis: Well, no, it was never really job number one. It’s more like the apex or the capstone. Even though it’s it has, as you say, the endangerment finding is foundational, both legally and scientifically for all, for the larger, climate regulatory complex that’s been built up over the years. However, there were more urgent threats to market liberty then the endangerment finding itself, that the particular regulations that were advanced in its name and to some extent supported by it, see only some of some of those.

Only the motor vehicle regulations were directly triggered by it. But then all the others were at least informed by it. It created what you might call a court of public opinion that would always be favorable to it. And it was, in some sense, also for some of those other regulations, a legal requisite. But the Clean Power Plan, which was the big Obama administration initiative, the centerpiece of their Paris Climate Agreement emission reduction pledge, for example, that really threatened to skew the entire electricity marketplace in favor of renewables.

It was a clear case of government’s putting its thumb, not just its thumb, but maybe both feet on the scales. And then against coal and natural gas power plants. But that was raised up to 11. You know, Spinal Tap is coming back, I’m told. Under the Biden administration, they basically wanted to squeeze coal just completely out of the nation’s electricity, fuel mix just over the next decade to 15 years.

So then there was the California threat, which is, you know, when California, under the Clean Air Act, adopts an emission standard, every other state is welcome to opt in. So, that meant all the blue states were going to outlaw the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars in their respective states.

So those things had to really be taken care of first. But ultimately those things could come back unless the endangerment finding was overturned, was repealed. So, I always thought that would be kind of a second term, a second Trump term initiative. Although there were many people, including here at CEI, who wanted to push them to take on the endangerment finding in the first term.

And I think just through serendipity, it’s now being tackled during a period when repeal could actually succeed.

Richard Morrison: Right. So, the question of how and why to get rid of this policy, of course, raises the question, what were the ostensible justifications for it in the first place? And so, the people that have defended have said, oh, well, there’s all this, all this sound science that, you know, argues for why we should have an endangerment finding.

Why are these greenhouse gas emissions, specifically from vehicles, a threat to human health? You have, of course, plenty of objections to that. To the science and reports that went into the endangerment finding. And, and so let’s go through some of those. You write that the computer models, for example, that are widely used by the United Nations and some U.S. government research, agencies, are biased towards producing warmer temperatures, warmer than justified temperature forecasts. How does it work that we have these over-warmed, expectations of future climate?

Marlo Lewis: Well, first, perhaps I should clarify that the endangerment finding really relied on three methodological biases, one of them is what I call overheated models or models that are tuned too hot, they’re too sensitive. They project or predict, if you will, too much warming from a given increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric concentration. The other is they would run those models with emissions scenarios that were wildly inflated. Just completely unrealistic, they essentially assume the whole global economy would, by the end of the century, return to a coal-based energy system. And then third, as I think we’ll get to, is the idea that you can’t consider how we might adapt to climate change over a period of decades and determining how dangerous climate change is, which I just think is not only unscientific but unreasonable.

But anyway, as to the as to the models themselves, the models like are simply hypotheses. And in science, hypotheses are tested by comparing the prediction that you’re making to the data. Well, the data has to do with what’s going to happen in the year 2070 or 2080 or 2100. So obviously we cannot test these hypotheses, these models with data because they’re too off.

They’re too far off in the future or at least we can’t test them against the actual results. But one thing that we can do is run the models from an earlier period up to the present and see how much warming they predict between, say, the year 1900 and the year 2025, or between 1979, which is when we first start to have great data on the on the middle atmosphere, the bulk atmosphere where most of the greenhouse gas effect occurs.

It’s called the troposphere. So, we look at the tropospheric temperature change in the models from 1979 up to the present and then compare that to actual observed temperatures by satellites and balloons and so on. And so what you find there is that the scientists who construct the models just do the best they can in trying to figure out how the climate works and how it will react to greenhouse gas concentration.

But they really don’t know and many of the components are really just guesstimates. They’re educated guesses. What they do is, they adopt a parameter which is like, well, we really don’t know. But we think that that the effect that this will have on, say, the carbon cycle, which is how much of the carbon dioxide emissions stay in the atmosphere versus how much will go into the soils or the oceans.

We’ll just take a guess how that’s going to change over time. And that will be a component of the model. And then they would look at basically surface temperature change over the earlier periods, earlier decades and compare those two model outputs. And if there was a variance, then they would adjust these parameters.

And [they would do this] until they got something that resembled history, and then they said, the model has been trained properly. And now we think it’s predictive. But it turns out that that only works when you’re testing the models against the data that was already used to train the model. In other words, it’s like, taking a quiz or a test, but you’ve seen the answers beforehand.

What you really need to do then is look at how well the models, retrodict or hind-cast what has occurred in the troposphere, which is where the greenhouse gas mainly occurs because the models were not trained on tropospheric data. And as it turns out, in almost all cases, going back to when the endangerment finding was made, all the models on average over-predict warming by at least a factor of two in the troposphere or in the critical parts of the troposphere, the tropics, for example, and less so in other parts of the troposphere, the global troposphere.

But it’s still significant, it’s like at least, 149% versus 100%. So, an extra 49% increase in warming in certain parts of the global troposphere. But in the tropical troposphere, which is really a critical place because that’s where what’s called the positive amplification, the positive feedbacks are supposed to be strongest, and the models over-predict by a factor of two or more.

Richard Morrison: And, you know, one of the things we’ve said for a long time is that, because there’s an institutional bias in the world of climate science towards more alarmism, towards rewarding the more alarming results. There’s not enough incentive to question alarmist results. In other words, researchers are rewarded for the most alarming possible interpretation of their models.

Therefore, it is not surprising that they don’t examine them, in fact, check them and do this sort of process. You are to, you know, sort of poke holes in them, in a way, in a sort of traditional, adversarial way, the way we sort of expect science to be done, which is like, I have a thesis, I have Theory B and you have Theory A and then we publish our results in our respective journals and then we fight and try to undermine each other and try to prove that my theory is better than your theory.

But for a number of reasons, for sociological reasons, but also because of government funding of science reasons that, a lot of the people who are in charge of these processes and these institutions have already decided manmade global warming is going to be a catastrophe. And the job of scientists is to produce more reports about how bad it’s going to be, so we can scare politicians into adopting the quote-unquote right policies. The question is not, is this really happening?

Marlo Lewis: Well, you’re absolutely right, Richard. And, I mean, I couldn’t have said it better – your summary, I think, is just spot on. And the point about funding is critical because most people are not aware of this. Many people probably assume that the fossil fuel companies put up a lot of money for climate studies and they don’t.

I mean, if they do it all, it’s a pittance. The federal government is the primary funder of climate research in the world, and its tens of billions of dollars in some years. And that’s supports literally hundreds of researchers. And he who pays the piper, you know, calls the tune.

Now, that doesn’t mean that that these people who receive this money to give the funding agencies the results they want – so that they can regulate people because, that’s what they exist to do – are consciously engaged in fraud, but it means that, first of all, with few exceptions, the only studies that are funded are those that are looking for how bad climate change is, and therefore it attracts people to the field who want to study that and publish on that.

It also means that the universities, the research institutions, are very reluctant to hire anyone who would strike a skeptical chord, for fear of offending their donor, which is a federal agency. And it means that the administrators don’t want to hire or promote scientists who might rock the boat, because one of the things that the university departments get from these government grants is just enormous amounts of money for administrative overheads.

Sometimes it’s almost half of the grant that goes to administration, which subsidizes a very lavish and, and lazy lifestyle of the administrator, the administrative class at the universities. And so over time, you have fewer and fewer people in a field who are who are even willing to risk their careers by questioning the consensus.

And then those people end up becoming peer reviewers for the journals, which also, you know, if it bleeds, it leads – the professional journals love to have scary results from these climate studies so that they can make waves for their publication in the media, the larger media. And so, it becomes very difficult for anyone to have a voice that is different from the consensus that actually gets heard.

Now, one of the things that happened under the new Trump administration is that five so-called climate skeptics or contrarians, I would call them realists, wrote a report for the Department of Energy, presenting an alternative view for the first time. I mean, this is amazing that in all these decades, this is the first U.S. government report that questions the orthodoxy.

Okay. And of course, it was savaged and it was litigated against. And, and I would say that was certainly caricatured. I’m not going to use the word “defame,” as it has a legal definition that I’m not sure that I would be using appropriately. But one of the things I did was defend the honor of that report, because I thought it was actually a very fine start.

It was just a draft report and went through a notice and comment period, but the authors were not allowed to finish or finalize it. Which is just almost unheard of, that you would put out, a government report for comment, but the working group that wrote it would be dissolved before it could come to term. You know, only a few months later.

Richard Morrison: And this process of research orthodoxy [exists] where the people in the field, the relatively small number of lead researchers, the people who are peer reviewers on journals, the journal editors, as well as grant makers [are closely aligned with] the federal government, in this country, U.S. federal government agents, government agents in other countries as well.

This isn’t something that’s confined to, climate change, right? There was, you know, our friend, Terence Kealey, who’s a scientist in the UK, has written about the problems that come with government funding and the strings that come attached. And he just wrote a report recently for the Cato Institute.

He did a podcast episode about it, a few weeks ago, about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and funding in the United States, and how there are any number of human health, welfare, and nutrition theories over the years that have been horribly wrong-headed but have persisted for decades as the sort of the de rigueur way of looking at various problems, because of this sort of tiny, self-selecting, self-preferencing cabal of the people who make decisions about what science gets done and who gets funded and who gets who gets paid to do it. Terrence mentioned the idea that high protein and fat diets are worse than higher carbohydrate diet, even though we know that’s completely opposite. Our old former colleague, Michelle Minton wrote a long, very fascinating paper about salt and federal government [dietary] guidelines. And it was the exact same dynamic whereby a tiny handful of government policymakers decided that sodium levels above a certain level were terrible for you.

And that became the standard for hypertension and heart disease. Even though we now know it’s not true. And there were plenty of critics, importantly, even at the time, people who were skeptics, of that consensus view who were able to show it was not true, but they were denounced as cranks and shut out and said like, “Oh, no, no, you’re a weirdo. You’re not part of our consensus group here. We’re doing the real science here.” Even though, you know, decades later, we now know, they were incorrect. So, it’s a dynamic which I think is very important to understand in the context of climate research. But it’s a dynamic that’s validated with examples in lots of other scientific disciplines as well that have also had negative consequences.

Marlo Lewis: You’re absolutely right. And our late, lamented colleague, Patrick Michaels and Terence Kealey co-edited a book called Scientocracy. And Michelle Minton wrote a chapter in there on salt as and it was, you know, it I think it had 12 or 13 contributors. So, yes, it is it is a pattern.

And there are there are cases of cabals there. I highly recommended a book by, a British academic, Stuart Ritchie, called Science Fictions, and he discusses a cabal that formed around the understanding of the causes of Alzheimer’s disease. And they actually conspired among themselves to keep people who had alternate explanations or hypotheses out of print.

In most cases, though, it doesn’t require any conscious coordination. As Patrick Michaels once said in a wonderful essay that I think I link to in one of these articles. The essay was entitled “Pal Review.” And what he said is that, you know, these researchers are smart. They all know which side their bread is buttered on.

And so it doesn’t take much for a reviewer to see a paper that says, “climate change is not really cracked up to be everything we’re told” to realize that opinion threatens the gravy train and on which he lives professionally and which is the source of his own prestige. And Pat said, heaven have mercy on anyone who suggests about climate change that there’s really not much we can do about it anyway.

And so, you don’t really need to get any kind of centralized instruction in order to bias an entire literature – just the incentives. This is what public choice theory is all about, of course. And it’s what people who really deny economic reality refuse to understand. And so when we see people like us say, you know, the incentives here are misaligned and they’re causing undesirable outcomes, they accuse us of being conspiracy theorists in the sense that we think that there is some central coordinating body somewhere, but that’s not what we mean. We mean that there is a [scientific] marketplace, and its incentives will arrange outcomes that benefit people without it necessarily being the intention of any one participant. You know, the “I, Pencil” idea. The same thing works in public policy. People figure out their incentives and start acting and talking accordingly. Sometimes not even aware that they’re doing it.

Richard Morrison: It also kind of reminds me of a comment Richard Lindzen making many years ago, and this was at a science briefing hosted by CEI, probably 20-plus years ago. So Lindzen is now an emeritus professor at MIT, but a very distinguished person who’s done a lot of impressive work on climate science and became one of the leading skeptics in those years when – probably around this time – the endangerment finding was so in the news.

But he was giving a presentation about climate models, and he was talking about some of the same things you were describing about models being overheated or not having the predictive value that they supposedly have for what the temperature is going to be on Tuesday afternoon, 100 years from now.

And he said, sometimes people say “Well, if you criticize these models, you’re anti-science or you’re being a knuckle dragger. You’re not respecting the knowledge of the people that that created them.” And he said no, we’re not saying that these models aren’t very sophisticated. They are very complex. They were developed by very smart, very highly trained people. They just don’t provide what their promoters claim they provide, which is certainty about what the weather everywhere in the world is going to be. And again, [on the time scale of] 70, 90, 100 years, they don’t have the predictive value they would need to have if we were going to rely on them for how every government in the world is going to manage their economies and respond to climate change over the next 100 years.

So, when we say, well, there’s bad climate science here and there’s bad policy based on bad climate science, we’re not saying all the climate scientists are dummies, or they’re all bad or they’re all evil, or they’re all wrong. It’s just that a lot of the science is taken from the journal article stage to an activist, political-agenda stage by the people in the middle, not necessarily the people who are in their labs with their computer simulation. So, it’s possible to do bad science, but it’s possible also to do good science that gets misapplied or upon which too many assumptions are based.

Marlo Lewis: Yeah. Well, there are certain methodological biases that I talk about are very widespread and it’s really hard to understand how it got so bad. But, for example, the inflated emissions scenarios, the most popular ones, the most influential, are called RCP 8.5 and SP 58.5. Now what the 8.5 stands for is watts per square meter.

And that is, from a certain emission trajectory. And growth and concentration, you can say, well, that’s how much extra heat energy is added to the climate system compared to the pre-industrial climate. Okay. But both of these were considered extreme scenarios or high-end scenarios by their creators. But the official interpreters, which are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Government Climate Change Research Program, saw fit to describe them, even if not always in so many words, as business as usual.

This is where the climate is going. This is where emissions are headed. Unless the world’s governments gang up in order to force the economies of the world to transform toward a non-fossil fuel future and, these things, were so influential they corrupted the entire body of climate science impact literature. If you look at Google Scholar, for example, 51,000 studies have been published using RCP 8.5 and 15,500 have been published using the other one SP 58.5. In order to figure out what the effects of these scenarios would be on various things that people care about, like corn yields or sea levels in different places and so on. But these scenarios all derive from an earlier set of socio-economic development scenarios which assumed that the world would increasingly rely on coal as its primary energy source.

By what was called “learning by extraction,” efficiencies improved and economies of scale [were achieved] and nothing like this happened. I mean, the assumption here, for example, was that oil and gas would become harder and harder and more and more expensive to extract, and the world would have to turn to coal for liquid fuel.

It’s called coal to liquids or coal to gas, coal gasification to run power plants. And so, this was sort of the standard wisdom of the time. And it just kept going on. And it wasn’t until the 2020s that people generally, the experts in general, not just the few leaders like Roger Pielke Jr., our friend over at the American Enterprise Institute, saw that this was not in any way real.

The most accurate – I mean, it’s not even the most accurate – but it’s the International Energy Agency’s projection now of where the baseline emissions are going and also the Resources for the Future, which is a highly reputable environmental research group, is that emissions in the year 2050 will be about one half what we’re projected in these high-end emissions scenarios. And by 2100, emissions would be less than one fifth [of what was previously predicted].

But for over a decade, this was considered the future. Unless we all got behind the net-zero agenda. So, this fed the alarmism of Washington politics and of global politics, especially of UN politics. And let me just say that even the IPP, the International Energy Agency and Resources of the Future’s baselines, which were way down of emissions, have already become obsolete, and now we need something even cooler.

But these baselines were critical for the narrative that we’re looking at 4 to 8°C of global warming. By 2100, which would be doomsday. I mean, that’s what they said. The other thing, though, that they had that the EPA decided to do, and it’s not just implicit. It’s expressed in the endangerment finding that we have determined that [we will not] consider the potential of adaptation – which just basically means innovation and investment in the marketplace in ways that make life safer, healthier, and more comfortable – regardless of what the circumstances or conditions are that people have to deal with.

You know, the climates in different parts of the world are very different. But you can have a prosperous country in Singapore and you can have a prosperous country in Canada, you know? So, I mean, it’s obvious that adaptation to climatic challenges is something that the human race has been practicing for a long time, since time immemorial.

Anyway, the EPA said that considering how we might adapt to climate change over a period of decades is outside the scope of an endangerment finding. So that’s equivalent to saying that if someone asked you, well, what are the health risks of winter? You know that, well, then we can’t consider the availability of warm clothes, heated buildings, health clinics, chicken soup, you know, flu shots. We have to just assume that human beings are still naked, shivering savages, like they were in pre-industrial ages or even prehistoric ages, to figure out how dangerous climate change is going to be by the year 2100.

Richard Morrison: Well, yeah. You know, this scenario where they are explicitly declaiming, both within the endangerment finding, plenty of other climate change scenarios, saying, “Oh, well, we’re not going to even think about adaptation.” I mean, that would be like saying that everyone in South Florida will drown because of higher sea levels, because they’ll just sit on the beach and not move as the water slowly moves over their head. Even if you think sea level rise is a problem and will be a problem in the future, obviously it’s a slow incremental problem.

And even if it’s more expensive than we want it to be, people will adapt slowly as time goes on. They’re not literally going to sit there and wait for the water to rise over their heads. But that’s almost what this no-adaptation theory seems to be, the direction in which it asks us to think.

Marlo Lewis: Yes, exactly right. And I reference a study, Hinkle, at al. (2014), published by the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which says, okay, let’s look at a high-end global warming scenario, RCP 8.5. There’s a range within our RCP 8.5. Okay. Let’s look at the top of the range of how warm it could get.

Let’s say there was, you know, 5 to 6ft of sea level rise. What if we just maintain the current defenses that we have now for coastal flooding around the world? Well, then about 4.6% of the human population will be affected by flooding by 2100. And that could actually depress global GDP by 9.3%. Okay, that’s really serious. That’s really bad.

But what if we just anticipate sea level rise, and if and when it occurs at certain rates and build accordingly? Well, then you end up having tens of billions of dollars more damage a year from flooding. You do, and you have to spend tens of billions of dollars more a year to build dikes and seawalls and flood control systems.

However, what happens is that the relative impact of sea, of coastal flooding, declines from about 0.05% of global GDP. That’s what it is now down to 0.008%. So that’s a 66-fold reduction in relative impact. And better still, instead of there being something like 3.4 million people a year, which is the case in the year 2000, who are flooded, who get who get their houses damaged by floods, not who drown.

Okay. Down to 15,000. So, a 99% reduction in the number of people who are adversely affected by flooding in the year 2100, if we just adapt. So, in other words, through adaptation, we can actually be better off, way better off than we are today. In spite of a high-end global warming and sea level rise scenario.

And let me just give you one other set of facts which are just extraordinary, which people who say, “Oh, well, man, like the climate, it’s changing. So, we won’t be able to adapt to that because we’ll be hit with stuff that we’ve never been hit with before.” Consider this is the power of adaptation in the 1870s. That decade, an estimated 50 million people worldwide died from extreme weather, floods, droughts, severe storms, extreme temperatures.

Okay, by the 1920s, that was 5 million a year. It’s an order of magnitude decrease. By the 1970s, it’s 500,000 a year. And then by the 2020s, the next 50 years, it was down. to 50,000. So, we have an order of magnitude decrease in climate related deaths on 50-year intervals. And that just shows that the risk of any person globally, on average today, dying from an extreme weather event is more than 99% lower than it was 100 years ago in the 1920s.

So, one of the questions I would ask people who are enthusiastic about the global warming agenda, the net-zero agenda, is if we are living in a climate crisis now, what words could possibly describe the climatic horrors of the 1920s? Or the 1870s? And why wasn’t it that nobody then knew they were living in a climate crisis? Could it be that they didn’t go to Harvard or Yale?

Richard Morrison: I mean, amazingly, it seems that technology in a wealthier society manages to insulate us from a lot more hazards than it creates.

Marlo Lewis: Absolutely.

Richard Morrison: You’ve written in the past extensively about the negative impacts of climate change being highly debatable. And we’ve just had that conversation here, but the negative impacts of bad climate policy are often much clearer and easier to warn about. And in some conversations, some climate scientist, some climate activists especially will basically say, “Even if we’re not 100% sure about future climate change being catastrophic, we should still adopt aggressive climate policies now because, the worst that could happen is just we maybe we build more wind and solar than we need. And maybe we don’t need it, but, you know, whatever. That’s fine – it’s not a big deal. But if you’re wrong and there is a catastrophe, then we have a catastrophe to deal with. So obviously we should have really aggressive climate policies.” But presumably you would suggest that there are some significant risks to overreacting to climate threats now.

Marlo Lewis: Obviously. I mean, one of them is that energy is truly the lifeblood of modern civilization, commercial energy. I mean, human beings always sought out some kind of energy source. It was usually of the root for, you know, for eons, it was the, the renewable variety. You know, you chop down wood from the forest.

Richard Morrison: Sticks and dung.

Marlo Lewis: Yes. But the Industrial Revolution was really, at the heart of it, an energy revolution. It was harnessing coal at first and then interestingly, the other so-called energy transitions were really not transitions so much as additions because people are still using wood today. In Vermont, they burn a lot of wood for heat, and so you just add one.

But the people who are advocating that we somehow replace all the others with wind and solar they’re gambling with human health and welfare on a gigantic scale of which there are unaware, because without abundant, reliable, affordable energy, human life is really nasty, poor, brutal and short and the whole idea of, for example, achieving net-zero by a certain point, especially if you’re going to really aim for net-zero by 2050, there’s no way you can do that without putting the whole developing world on an energy diet.

And these are people who are already energy starved. You know, there are still over a billion people who have have no access to electricity at all. And then you have another billion who have insufficient electricity for industry. Also people who still lack motorized transport, which people really need in order to flourish.

Richard Morrison: And we [in the developed world] very much take for granted.

Marlo Lewis: Yes, of course we do.

Richard Morrison: And so, to wrap up, we’ve got this somewhat bureaucratic process going on at the federal level when it comes to EPA regulations. And they’re all sort of moving through this process. Some of them are subject to lawsuits. And, sometimes, it’s two steps forward and one step back when you’re trying to do executive policymaking.

What is the next step for the endangerment finding, for what the EPA is going to do next? And what are we what are we expecting is likely the next step in the current administration unwinding a lot of stuff that goes back to the Obama and Biden years?

Marlo Lewis: Well, the affirmative next thing would be the EPA has to finalize the endangerment repeal proposal. And so that likely will happen early in 2026. I think that they were originally hoping to do it by the end of the year. But the government shutdown, you know, slows down the gears of government in many areas, including regulatory action, which includes deregulatory action.

So, that’s going to be the next thing that happens in this particular story. And of course, it will be aggressively litigated and under the Clean Air Act, all litigation begins with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. But it’s a guarantee that whatever the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decides will be appealed to the Supreme Court. That’s probably where it’s going to end up. I’m not enough of a court-watcher to predict whether that will be in 2026, or maybe it will be in 2027. But the Trump administration has proposed several other deregulatory measures.

One of them they just proposed was for fuel economy standards. They want to roll back the [Corporate Average Fue Economy] standards, I think based on a just an ingenious legal theory. I kicked myself that I never really appreciated it. I don’t know if there’s time to get into it, so I won’t, unless you ask me.

But the other thing that’s still pending is the proposal to overturn the Biden administration’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, which really looked forward to a time when coal would supply, I think it’s 1.89% of U.S. electricity. And, basically, it would squeeze coal out of the marketplace fast and, and more completely than the original Clean Power Plan, but would also basically make investment in new natural gas generation uneconomical because new natural gas generation would have to implement something called 90% carbon capture and storage.

And I don’t know how they would possibly do that. There is not a network of carbon dioxide pipelines that would be required to implement anything like that. And it would take years to site and permit all of that. And carbon capture and storage makes any form of electric generation less energy efficient and more costly.

So, I think the effect of that would just people would simply say, “No, I’m just not going to build any,” which I think is the objective, the actual objective, even though it’s unstated. But the repeal of that policy is also obviously going to come down the pike very soon. And so we’ll just have to see what happens next.

Richard Morrison: All right, big, exciting stuff coming in 2026. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Merlo. And diving in deep on an important aspect of environmental policy.

Marlo Lewis: Thank you very much, Richard.

Richard Morrison: So, before we go tell people where they should find your work online.

Marlo Lewis: Okay. Thanks. Please come to CEI dot org and you can, look, click on blogs and you’ll see I have a two-part essay on the endangerment finding there. Actually, three. I have three parts, I just posted something recently on the endangerment finding and at least two of the three blog posts were also linked to two op-eds that I had on a website called Watt’s Up With That? where I rebut the allegations and I think all of them either misfire or backfire, that a team of reporters at Politico wrote, in order to discredit the Department of Energy climate science draft report, which I think is probably the best climate science report to come out of the US government in my lifetime.

Richard Morrison: All right. And we’ll include links to Marlo’s work in the show notes as well. Thanks again, Marlo, for being with us.

Marlo Lewis: A pleasure.