Trump’s EPA Rollback Joins a Long, Embarrassing History of Science Denial
I am writing this from New Zealand. I grew up here. I am back visiting family.
New Zealand is a small country. Five million people. But it has a habit of picking fights with superpowers when the science is clear.
In 1984, New Zealand banned nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships from its waters. The United States retaliated. They cut off intelligence sharing. They downgraded New Zealand from ally to “friend.” They expected a tiny country in the South Pacific to fold.
New Zealand did not fold. It passed the ban into law in 1987. It became the first sovereign nation to be completely nuclear-free by law. Today, that decision is a point of national pride across every political party.
That same instinct drove New Zealand to become one of the first countries to put its climate commitments into law with the Zero Carbon Act in 2019. It was the first country to mandate disclosure of climate-related financial risks. It banned new offshore oil and gas exploration. It created an independent Climate Change Commission to hold its own government accountable.
New Zealand is not perfect in terms of climate. Its emissions have gone up, not down. Agriculture accounts for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. But it built the legal and institutional framework to address it. It chose to listen to the science.
I am watching the United States do the opposite.
Last week, the Trump administration killed the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding. That finding was the government’s official recognition that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health. It was the legal foundation for almost every federal climate rule in the country.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called it “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.” He called climate science a “religion.” He said the EPA is “driving a dagger straight into the heart” of it.
Think about what that means. The U.S. government just declared that 99% of climate researchers are wrong. Not debatable. Not worth studying. Just wrong.
This is not a policy disagreement. This is science denial. And it has a long, ugly history.
The Flat Earthers
In the third century BC, a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth using shadows and basic geometry. He was off by less than 2%.
That didn’t stop powerful people from insisting the Earth was flat for centuries afterward. Sailors knew better. Astronomers knew better. But the flat-Earth idea persisted because it served those in charge. It was simple. It was comfortable. It didn’t threaten their authority.
Sound familiar?
The Tobacco Playbook
In 1953, the CEOs of America’s biggest tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York. They had a problem. The science linking cigarettes to cancer was getting harder to ignore.
They didn’t try to disprove the findings. They attacked the idea of scientific certainty itself. They funded their own “research.” They found the small number of scientists who disagreed and gave them a megaphone. They told the public the science was “unsettled.”
Tobacco killed about 100 million people in the 20th century. The industry knew it was deadly. They denied it anyway. They denied it for money.
The fossil fuel industry copied this playbook. Internal documents show that ExxonMobil’s own scientists confirmed human-caused climate change in the late 1970s. Their predictions were accurate. Exxon knew what was coming.
They spent the next 40 years paying people to cast doubt.
The “Debate” That Doesn’t Exist
Trump has called climate change a “con job” and a “hoax.” His Department of Energy published a report last year claiming that higher CO2 levels are good for plants.
The actual facts: over 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that humans are causing climate change. NASA agrees. NOAA agrees. The science academies of every major industrialized country agree. The U.S. military calls climate change a national security threat.
The scientific agreement on human-caused climate change is stronger than the agreement that linked smoking to lung cancer when the Surgeon General first warned the public.
There is no debate among scientists. There is a debate among politicians. Those are different things.
A Pattern You Can Set Your Watch To
Science denial follows the same script every time.
The science shows up. Researchers publish findings. Other researchers test and confirm them. Agreement builds.
The threatened industry fights back. Not with better science. With better PR. They fund their own “studies.” They find the 1% who disagree and hold them up as equals to the 99%. They tell the public the science is “unsettled” or “political.”
Politicians give them cover. Officials who take industry money repeat the talking points. They treat facts like opinions. They attack the scientists.
People pay the price. The gap between what science knows and what politicians do costs lives. It cost lives with tobacco. It cost lives with lead paint. It cost lives with acid rain. It is costing lives right now with climate change.
This same script played out with Galileo. With germ theory. With evolution. With the ozone layer. Every time, science won. But the delay was brutal.
What Makes This One Worse
Past episodes of science denial usually involved a single industry or issue. Climate denial is bigger.
The 2009 endangerment finding was not some small regulation. It was the legal basis for controlling emissions from cars, trucks, power plants, and factories. Transportation and power generation each account for about 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Killing the finding doesn’t roll back one rule. It rips the floor out from under all of them.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Courts have backed the endangerment finding again and again, most recently in 2023. Even Tesla told the administration to keep it.
This will end up in court. It will take years. While the lawyers fight, emissions keep rising. Temperatures keep climbing. Storms keep getting worse.
That is the real cost of science denial. It is not just wrong. It is expensive. In dollars. In lives. In time, we do not have.
Where This Leaves Us
In every case of science denial in history, one side ended up looking like the villains.
It was never the scientists.
The Catholic Church apologized to Galileo. It took 359 years. Tobacco companies were found guilty of fraud and racketeering. Leaded gasoline was banned decades after scientists proved it was poisoning children.
The people who denied the science were never proven right. Not once.
Trump and Zeldin are betting that climate science will be the first exception. That 99.9% of the world’s climate scientists got it wrong, and a few political appointees got it right.
In 1984, New Zealand stood up to the most powerful country on Earth over nuclear weapons. The U.S. called it reckless. History called it leadership.
Forty years later, I am sitting in that same small country watching the most powerful nation on Earth tear up its own climate science. A country with five million people got this right. A country with 330 million just got it very wrong.
That is a bad bet. History says so. It always does.