Bellyfeel
3 years, 5 months, 1 hour
22 February 2026
Open lying from the highest office of government.
'Moving away from science doesn’t just weaken U.S. environmental and public health policies. It threatens U.S. leadership on every issue where credibility matters.'
That is the closing line of the statement put out by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in response to the announcement of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 12 February that it was repealing the 'endangerment finding' of 2009, that climate change represents a public health threat. That decision at a stroke removes the underpinning of all the US federal rules and standards for tackling climate change.
The WRI statement highlights that whilst what we all do matters, the basis on which we make our decisions and justify them, arguably matters more.
In the latest Outrage and Optimism podcast, guest Manish Bapna, the highly-respected President and CEO of the US National Resources Defense Council, provides a detailed and dispassionate analysis of the decision and how it rests on three bases, two of them patently indefensible and one shaky.
The first, that the science doesn’t support the endangerment finding, is at odds with the overwhelming scientific consensus globally. In the podcast Tom Rivett-Carnac describes President Trump’s assertion that the original determination had 'no basis in fact' as “open lying from the highest office of government”.
The second, that the legal basis of the EPA power was flawed is, according to Manish, very unlikely to survive legal challenge, ultimately to the US Supreme Court.
And the third, that the US will benefit economically, rests on only measuring supposed benefits to US industry and ascribing a value of zero to all the planet and society implications of climate change.
It is evident to almost everyone outside the US and many of its own citizens that this latest action by the administration is going to be deeply damaging even to US interests. But the damage runs much deeper than the actual decision. When a supposedly independent government agency includes a phrase like 'climate change zealots' in an official statement, we know we are now in the world of George Orwell's bellyfeel.