Trump wants to scrap scientific finding key to fighting climate change

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

The Trump administration is trying to overturn the EPA's endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gas emissions can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Lisa Heinzerling, former senior climate policy counsel to the EPA administrator, joins us to discuss what this could mean for the U.S. government's efforts to fight climate change. Then, some of the homes still standing after fires tore through Southern California earlier this year are too toxic to live in. We speak with two Altadena homeowners about their experiences. And, the semicolon has been described as a "graceful pause" in writing. But this graceful punctuation mark is being forgotten. The Washington Post's Mark Lasswell talks about what the semicolon is for and what it means that it's fading away.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:17.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:23.1	What's the significance? How big is the endangerment finding? While repealing it will be the
0:29.2	largest deregulatory action in the history of America. So it's kind of a big deal.
0:34.4	The Trump administration is gearing up to overturn a key rule from the EPA.
0:40.2	What does it all mean for the fight against climate change?
0:50.9	It's July 29th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston.
0:57.2	I'm Kalyani Saxena.
1:01.3	Today on the show, we'll touch base with two survivors of the Eaton Fire in Southern California.
1:07.7	Their homes were left standing, but testing shows they're contaminated with toxic
1:12.6	chemicals. And now the residents are pushing for more information.
1:16.6	So how do we come together as a community to say, hey, this is a problem for all of us and
1:21.6	let's, you know, let's solve it together. And we'll spend some time waxing poetic about the pros and cons of the semicolon.
1:29.7	Kurt Vonnegut said, don't use semicolon.
1:32.5	All it does is show people that you went to college.
1:35.5	But first, we need to spend some time discussing a new proposal from the Trump administration to overturn the EPA's endangerment finding.
1:44.1	All right, pause. What exactly is the endangerment finding. All right, pause.
1:45.0	What exactly is the endangerment finding?
1:48.0	Well, it's a key rule from 2009 issued by the Environmental Protection Agency
1:53.0	that says greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.
1:58.0	It allows the government to ensure that pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane
	...

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