We told you so: EPA was wrong about CO2 from the start

For years, Washington politicians told the American people there was a carbon dioxide (CO2) “problem” so serious it justified rewriting our entire energy economy. They claimed CO2 was dangerous, labeled it an “endangerment,” and used that finding as a blank check for regulation, mandates, and subsidies.

Many of us warned that this wasn’t science… it was politics. Now, even the Environmental Protection Agency is backing away from that claim.

By repealing the so-called endangerment finding, the EPA has admitted what working Americans have known all along: CO2 was never the existential threat it was sold to be. This single regulatory reversal wipes out more than a trillion dollars in compliance costs and saves families thousands of dollars per vehicle.

But before taxpayers breathe a sigh of relief, we need to talk about the billions already wasted, and the billions more Washington still wants to spend.

CO2 makes up about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is essential for photosynthesis and life itself. Plants depend on it. Crops require it. Throughout Earth’s history, life flourished when CO2 levels were far higher than today.

Yet politicians treated this trace, life-supporting gas as if it were toxic waste. And once you convince people there’s a “crisis,” the spending never stops.

Now comes the most dangerous and dishonest phase of the carbon agenda.

After telling Americans that CO2 is a menace, the same policymakers are asking taxpayers to fund massive carbon capture and underground sequestration projects, projects that would take a harmless, widely dispersed gas and turn it into a concentrated substance capable of killing people if it escapes.

Think about that. For decades, regulators told us their mission was to clean up environmental hazards, reduce risk, and protect public health. Now they want to create a new health and safety threat on purpose, inject it underground, and hope nothing goes wrong, all while sending the bill to taxpayers.

This is where the conversation always gets uncomfortable, because it exposes the truth.

Every time you hear a multi-billion-dollar energy company brag about how they are “lowering carbon” or “cleaning up emissions,” ask two simple questions: Why? And who’s paying?

Now we know the answers. There is no real carbon emergency. And you’re paying for it anyway.

If carbon capture and sequestration were truly safe, proven, and economically viable, it wouldn’t need massive government subsidies. It wouldn’t rely on tax credits, grants, and federal guarantees. Companies would fund it themselves, just like every other productive investment in a free market.

Instead, taxpayers are being forced to bankroll projects that compress CO2 into dangerous concentrations, transport it across communities, and inject it underground near farms, water supplies, and homes. Regulators admit monitoring systems are incomplete. Long-term liability is unclear. And once the CO2 is injected, the public, not the corporation, will be left holding the risk.

That isn’t environmental protection. That’s regulatory insanity.

We talk a lot these days about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. We talk about “DOGE-ing” government, doing away with bloated programs that don’t solve real problems. Carbon capture subsidies should be at the top of that list.

This is corporate welfare disguised as climate policy.

It is billions of taxpayer dollars spent to “solve” a problem politicians overstated, using technology that isn’t proven at scale, while creating new safety risks that didn’t previously exist. And it all happens while families struggle with higher energy bills, inflation, and an electric grid that is less reliable than it was a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the global picture hasn’t changed. The United States is told to cut emissions, while countries like China continue building coal plants at a staggering pace. Emissions aren’t reduced, they’re exported, along with jobs and energy security.

The EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding is a step back toward honesty. It acknowledges that CO2 is not the villain it was made out to be.

Now policymakers need the courage to finish the job. That means ending the fear-based carbon narrative, stopping taxpayer handouts to politically favored corporations, and refusing to create new environmental and health risks in the name of virtue signaling.

Americans don’t need another green scheme. They need affordable, reliable energy, and a government that stops charging them to fix problems that never existed.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian.