The Men Who Sold the World

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/02/20/the-men-who-sold-the-world/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/ZiltQ

Social disaster is becoming increasingly affordable. On February 12 the Trump administration rescinded the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 EPA determination that “the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases…in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” For more than sixteen years the finding had required the EPA, under the Clean Air Act, to track, report, and limit climate-heating pollution from cars and trucks. Its repeal removes the scientific and legal basis that allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles, the largest source of emissions.

Emissions from stationary sources like power plants and fossil fuel infrastructure are regulated under a different section of the Clean Air Act. But the Trump administration has already proposed that those should not be regulated either, and in all likelihood the arguments it cited to end vehicle regulation will soon be applied to emissions in general. Administration officials believe that “climate change zealots” and the previous presidential administrations used “legal fictions” to “backdoor their ideological agendas on the American people.” Meanwhile, the calendar year 2024 was the first in which global mean surface air temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to the preindustrial baseline, a threshold widely taken as a tipping point beyond which irrevocable climate disaster becomes practically impossible to avoid. The EPA had not been doing enough to prevent climate change before; now it is actively intensifying the crisis.

In a press release announcing the repeal, the EPA claimed that it was “the single largest deregulatory act in US history.” It would, according to the agency, “save Americans over $1.3 trillion” and “result in an average cost savings of over $2,400 per vehicle,” which, they say, is “improving affordability and expanding consumer choice and ultimately advancing the American Dream.” The EPA has already been sued by several environmental groups, and the agency’s numbers have immediately been challenged. An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund argues that repealing vehicle standards will mean an additional 18 billion tons of emissions by 2055, generating something like $4.7 trillion in costs to Americans from health and environmental damage, plus 77,000 early deaths.

The administration’s move is clearly motivated by fossil fuel profits and ideological commitment. But these disputes over dollars, costs, benefits, taxes, and savings are focused on what economists call “externalities.” These are things, both good and bad, that are not represented by the price of a market transaction. The price of a scone doesn’t capture the pleasant smell of a bakery to its neighbors; the price at the pump doesn’t capture the environmental degradation produced by burning a gallon of gas.

*snip*