Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He welcomes comment at [email protected].

Last week’s decision by the Environmental Protection Agency repealing a 2009 “endangerment” finding that carbon dioxide emissions threaten the national and global environment was regrettable, potentially tragic — and predictable.

Corporate lobbyists, and now a solid phalanx of Republican lawmakers, have been battling against environmental laws and rules since 1970, when the original Clean Air Act written by Maine Sen. Ed Muskie was signed into law by President Richard Nixon — the same year Nixon created the EPA, consolidating a half dozen executive agencies.

The 1970 law included the first major restrictions on vehicle and power plant emissions that were then producing choking smog and dangerous air pollution throughout the Northeast and California. Public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable, and “clean cars” have been with us ever since.

New challenges soon emerged, however. “Acid rain” pollution from sulfur dioxide emissions, largely from Midwestern coal-burning plants, was killing fish and stunting tree growth in forests and lakes across Eastern Canada and the U.S. An alarming “ozone hole” had emerged in the upper atmosphere because of the widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigeration and aerosols. Left unchecked, CFC releases could have produced widespread skin cancer.

Sen. George Mitchell, Muskie’s successor, inherited his Environment Subcommittee chairmanship, and became majority leader in 1989. He pushed through the Clean Air Act of 1990 against daunting odds, and another Republican president, George H.W. Bush, signed it.

Sharply reduced sulfur dioxide levels restored forests and brought fish back to “dead” lakes and streams. Substitute chemicals shrank the ozone hole, and a companion international treaty produced a stunning environmental success story, at a quite reasonable cost.

Mitchell also held the first Senate hearings on global warming, which we now subsume under “climate change.” Carbon dioxide emissions, largely from fossil fuel burning, threaten to set off catastrophic rises in global temperature, returning the Earth in a century or less to atmospheric conditions existing 60 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the globe as far south as Antarctica.

All through the 1990s and 2000s, scientific evidence mounted that we were conducting the largest chemistry experiment on the atmosphere in humanity’s brief history, and that disasters of many kinds were the certain outcome.

When Barack Obama became president in 2009, the moment had arrived for renewal and expansion of the Clean Air Act. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, a veteran of previous clean air battles, took the chair of the key House committee. With an overwhelming House majority and a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, Democrats seemed poised to act.

Waxman was unable to even get a bill out of committee. Obama had other priorities, and the policy moderation represented by Republican presidents like Nixon and H.W. Bush had disappeared. Instead, the EPA acted with its “endangerment” finding through rule-making.

The new rules had major environmental and economic benefits. There are always costs involved for major shifts in industrial processes, but the worldwide boom in solar energy, led by China, and dramatic shift to wind energy throughout the “red” states of the Great Plains are unqualified successes.

Maine, like many other states, seeks a similar path. During the Biden administration, we finally began making the long-term investments necessary to make an inevitably slow and gradual shift away from fossil fuels.

There was strength to the EPA rules, chiefly because the 1990 law required the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, while not spelling out how it should be done; the science was then in its infancy. Even an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court repelled industry challenges, right through Donald Trump’s first term.

Then Trump was elected again, bent on pursuing a radical anti-environment agenda based on the absurd notion that fossil fuel burning at 20th century levels was just fine. He’s found the Cabinet officials, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who will carry out his pro-endangerment policies. Trump will fail in his effort to revive the coal industry, but his irrational “deregulation” mantra will further retard already halting international climate progress. 

One thing we know for sure: the next time Democrats take charge of Congress and win the presidency, they must be ready to act. Had the Clean Air Act been properly updated to address global warming, Trump would not have been able to scuttle the EPA rules. Perhaps even a few Republicans may be willing to get back on board next time.

One thing is sure. Our children and grandchildren will not thank us if they encounter what George Mitchell foresaw as a “world on fire.” I’m not a believer in environmental “catastrophism,” but anyone can see that time is not on our side. We just have to hope it’s not too late.