Endangerment Finding
It is true that, as President Trump says, that ending the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” of the Obama Era will be a major boost for the American car industry. It will probably help the Europeans as well.
It is also true that it will save car buyers more. Trump is on the money when he says that the move will knock $2,800 off the price tag of every new car that rolls off a Detroit assembly line.
It is also a gold-plated economic fact that the deregulation will put billions of dollars in the pockets of fossil fuel companies and their shareholders.
The 2009 “Endangerment Finding” is the foundation stone upon which a a big chunk of subsequent climate change legislation is based. It basically says that fossil fuel emissions—especially those from cars– are a danger to public health and should be regulated.
Any cyclist, motorcyclist or pedestrian that has stood behind a car for more than half a minute knows for a fact that breathing in car fumes is bad for you. But Trump—and the oil executives and manufacturers of petrol-driven cars—have decided that anyone who thinks so is peddling a “green scam.”
But cyclists are not alone. The UN has reviewed over 10,000 research papers on climate change and spoken with more than 10,000 climate change scientists. 97.1 percent of them say that our planet is warming. That this is a bad thing and cars are a major cause of the problem.
In 2024 greenhouse gases reached 424 parts per million, the highest ever in recorded history and 152 percent above pre-industrial era levels.
In the United States, cars, trucks and buses account for about 29% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Since Trump took office America’s fossil fuel emissions have grown by 1.9 percent.
But petrol and diesel are not the only polluters. Coal produces almost double the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the transport industry, and the latest developments in renewable technology means that renewable energy is now about half the cost of coal in both building and maintenance terms.
On the same day that Trump announced the end of the 2009 Endangerment Findings, the American coal industry presented him with a trophy and bestowed on him the title of “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.”
The Washington Post
My first news story was published in “The Washington Post.” I was a 13-year-old boy scout, and I wrote a 500-word article on badge-swapping at the Scout World Jamboree. It actually appeared on the front page with my byline. I was quite chuffed.
So, for me, the rapid decline of “The Post” has a personal element. It is even more personal one-third of the Post’s staff who were recently laid off. They are the victims of a changing media-scape and Donald Trump’s attack on the free press.
When the founder of Amazon, billionaire Jeff Bezos, bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million everyone heaved a sigh of relief. The Post had been struggling for years against the onslaught of the internet. If it was going to survive and prosper it needed an owner with deep pockets who believed in its mission and was prepared to inject millions—billions if necessary—to maintain the Post’s position in the pantheon of the great world newspapers.
Bezos promised to do just that. The local subscriber base had been shrinking as more and more readers switched to social media. So Bezos’s plan was to increase the subscriber base by going global. Which he did.
For about seven years, the Post thrived. And one of the reasons was that Bezos remembered the paper’s left of centre roots. Every editor must know what his readers want to read and produce articles that meet that demand. The Post’s readers are left of centre. They are mainly Democrats. During Trump’s first term Bezos kept to the paper’s traditional editorial line and it became a major thorn in the side of President Trump.
But after Trump went into the political wilderness for four years, things began to change. Trump had learned that he could use his power over government contracts to buy influence. Jeff Bezos also owns an aerospace and defense company called Blue Origin and Amazon is involved in providing cloud computing facilities to the Pentagon.
So, Trump invited Bezos down to Mar-a-Lago and dropped a few hints that an unfriendly Post could jeopardise government contracts worth tens of billions if Trump was re-elected. The result was a major shift in the editorial policy of “The Washington Post.”
An editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s bid for the presidency was pulled—on the orders of Jeff Bezos—at the last minute. As a result, the Post lost 220,000 subscribers in one day. Then, when Trump was re-elected, Bezos decreed that the paper’s opinion page would no longer be one the world’s great left of centre political platforms. Instead it would eschew political debate to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” More subscribers fled.
Announcing the recent cuts, Executive Editor Matt Murray, said: “We must re-invent our journalism and our business model.” That is another way of saying that the paper aims to achieve profitability by cutting costs. The problem is that newspapers don’t work that way. If you cut costs you also cut quality and when you cut quality you lose readers and without readers you become irrelevant and disappear.
Haiti
The ever-troubled island of Haiti could be in even more trouble or it could be turning the corner. Last week the mandate ended for the nine-member Presidential Transition Council that has been running since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise. As of this writing there is no official government in Haiti
The transitional council’s bickering members have effectively dissolved themselves and handed the country over to gang warfare. More than 1.4 million people have been displaced and the gangs pillage and rape at will. Hunger levels are as high as those in war-torn Sudan.
But Haiti has also created one of the world’s great ironies. While the Trump Administration is withdrawing from the UN on almost every other front, it is working hand-in-glove with the organisation to try and maintain some semblance of order in Haiti.
Together they are aggressively attacking the gangs while trying to persuade Haiti’s bickering politicians to put aside their grievances and personal ambitions to achieve basic security and stability so that elections can be held.
Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince’s airport has been closed to commercial flights from America for more than a year. The city’s main hospital is shut. Some 1,600 schools have been closed due to violence. In 2025, 8,100 people were murdered. 16,000 have been killed since 2022.
That is the bad news. Now for some sort of good news. A new 5,500-strong UN and US- backed “Gang Suppression Force” (GSF) is being prepared for operations on the island. It is equipped with air support and the latest drones. The first reinforcements—from Chad and Sri Lanka– will arrive in April.
At the same time, there are signs that the gangs have been put on the defensive for the first time in years. A team of American mercenaries and Haitian police have successfully launched a series of surprise night attacks. At the same time, the Haitian police have launched a new recruitment drive in an attempt to bring on an additional 4,000 officers.
The police and soldiers, however, can not be expected to do any more than hold back the gang-led tide of violence. No real progress can be made without an agreed political framework, and, at the moment, there is little prospect of that.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”
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19 Comments
“To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own”
Secretary of State Marcus Rubio in Europe this week at the security conference.
@Craig: What Rubio misleadingly refers to as a ‘climate cult’ is actually nothing more than, a sensible response to what scientists are universally telling us will happen, and indeed has already started to happen, as a direct result of continuing to burn fossil fuels.
@ Craig,
I may have misunderstood but I take it that your quote is made with someapproval.
So how do you suggest we should tackle the problem of ever increasing C02 atmospheric concentrations? Or maybe you think they aren’t a problem?
One thing we don’t do Peter is chase a fantasy target and impoverish those at the bottom & cripple UK industry in doing so ….
The average voters only yardstick will be the price of their energy bills – nothing more.
https://x.com/BBCPolitics/status/2016901375574069418
@Craig – “…even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else…”
This is an interesting few words, I suggest “competitors” is with respect to exploiting oil and gas are China and Russia, but “anything else” … would seem to include renewables, tarrifs, regulations etc.
Looks like another admission the US is on the way down and only really wants to play on its own.
Taking a Trump point of view, I’m a little surprised he hasn’t suggested putting lead back into petrol.
Two positive developments recently.
We are aiming to re-enter the EU energy grid.
The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism came into effect last month. It only applies to six sectors but it’s a move towards a system where they tax consumption of energy intensive goods rather than their production. The ideal is a carbon added tax where all imports are taxed on the energy that has gone in them (including fuels), locally extracted fuel is taxed at the same rate and all the tax can be reclaimed at the same rate. It means that local consumption is disincentivised but there is no advantage in moving production to more carbon friendly countries.
@ Craig,
SIr Dieter Helm and yourself are keen to tell us “how we don’t solve our problems”. So how about telling us how we do?
The first step, as with any problem, has to be quantifying the extent and seriousness of it.
In this case the build up of GH gases in the atmosphere. So how about starting by doing this ?
The elephant in the room is that actually China, india etc ARE making progress on CO2 emissions.
For example, China’s emissions have probably peaked: this is what really matters: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n0rh33
Here is India looking to get to net zero by 2070. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/03/21/solar-to-take-lead-as-india-targets-500-gw-of-renewables-by-2030/
These are the facts that need to be publicised so the “business as usual” types can’t hide behind the idea that nobody is dong anything about CO2 outputs.
@Craig
“The average voters only yardstick will be the price of their energy bills – nothing more.”
I don’t agree – many are very worried about climate change.
Besides nobody rational denies the existential nature of rapid climate climate change. Failure has huge costs and is not a rational option. Humanity has to choose wisely. You, Trump and the rest are choosing failure.
What I’m saying is that the vast majority of voters will judge the race to net zero not through stats or graphs but by how much their energy bills will be.
Failure is already here. As Lutnick said – “why on earth would Europe commit to net zero when they don’t even make a battery”
Tristan; Irrespective of those articles China has 1,995 operational coal fired power stations.
2025 Expansion: China added roughly 95GW of new coal and gas capacity in 2025, which was more than in 2024, despite a record deployment of solar and wind energy.
@CraigLevene. It won’t matter a toss what voters think if in the meantime we have further destroyed the ozone layer and heated the planet by NOT adopting Net Zero. When people realise that the appalling weather, storms and flooding could have been avoided if politicians had stuck to targets to reach net zero they will be truly pissed off.
Politicians need to start leading the debate, instead of parroting what they think focus groups say. LibDems might actually have to upset some voters by continuing to put forward policies that move us towards net zero.
On cost, the EU is now to base electricity prices on the cost of renewables, not gas and prices will fall. The cost of power here in Greece is significantly lower than in the UK and there is a big push to get people installing solar panels, airsource heat pumps and even more solar water heaters. There is also a requirement for better insulation in new buildings. And this from a government that just over 10 years ago was thought to be the economic basket case of the EU.
Time to get real about climate change, Craig.
@Tom
I’m interested in what the impact of these changes will be on Usonian life expectancy? I wonder if President Chump has worked it out. I suspect he has not tried, and it is not even a consideration, since he is pushing the USA back to the 1970s.
They already die 3 years earlier than Canadians (life expectancy at birth, whole population) with the number of people – especially children – they will with their guns, and with their motor vehicles, having a discernable effect *.
Reported by John Burn-Murdoch in the FT recently.
It is more than time to get serious about climate change, but having failed to so for the past 20 years since the Stern report made clear that early action SAVED money, the next best time to do so is now. As to the nonsense about it costing more, I could send you plenty of studies since Stern that confirm or amplify his conclusions. This recent Guardian article about the work being done at Oxford Brooks is a good place to start https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/12/economics-climate-crisis-complexity-scientist-plan
Correction – Oxford Martin School, not Oxford Brooks.
@Tristan & @Craig
I agree with Craig, in that people are focused on their energy bills, in part because of soundbite mantras of politicians and media influencers, who wish us to believe if we stripped out the “green” tariffs in our bills we would suddenly be transported to world where energy cost peanuts, and also like magic people will have jobs and spare money in their pockets…
Additionally, I agree with Tristan that many are, rightly, concerned about the extinction crisis we are facing brought about by the perfect storm of: climate change, environmental degradation, resource exhaustion, water and food shortages, over population… and by our ability to look the future in the face and resume digging with even more vigour whilst covering in greenwash…
Hence we need to be more positive about the real changes being made and what benefits are to us here in the UK and the sustainability of our society.
It would help the story if we were selling electricity really cheap when renewables are producing a surplus rather than paying generators to turn capacity off.
@Peter Davies – My understanding is that some of the grid upgrade work is to improve electricity flows so that better utilisation of renewables can be made. ie. reduce the amount of time the grid is paying renewable operators to stand down.
Obviously, a big challenge is going to be the erecting of new overhead lines in places where there are none presently (an associated challenge is the only producer of the new pylons is based in China…)
Personally, because much about renewables is best done at small scale, we need to be focusing on reducing the domestic/residential load, so that more of the existing grid capacity is available to business. this also has the benefit of removing middlemen – so beloved of the Conservatives, from the equation so that people can actually get cheap eletricity, not just a warm feeling their expensive electricity has come from some remote wind/solar farm.
Craig Levene 16th Feb ’26 – 12:26pm:
What I’m saying is that the vast majority of voters will judge the race to net zero not through stats or graphs but by how much their energy bills will be.
Indeed, once something hits people in the pocket they start to take an interest in it, especially when it costs them their jobs and future prosperity. Having followed this debate in depth for over 50 years I do think the tide is starting to turn. There seems to be some of the politics coming out of science and some science going into politics as we see here with President Trump and his well-informed team.
Reading BTL (Below The Line) comments under articles I’ve noticed a steady switch over recent years away from acceptance of the narrative. More and more posters are clearly doing their own research and discovering that much of what they’ve been told isn’t true. Such posters aren’t representative of the population as a whole, but my long-time observation is that they are often a good lead indicator of public opinion. I expect Net Zero to be a salient issue at the next Election.
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.