Finally, a rare and courageous step in the all-consuming battle against bureaucratic tyranny. The entire premise behind the EPA’s absurd “endangerment finding” rests on the idea that nameless federal regulators are entitled—even obligated—to trample on property rights, private contracts, and consumer choice, all under the paternalistic banner of “public health.” For fifteen years, the American people have been held hostage to regulatory edicts backed by dubious (often politicized) scientific claims, enforced at gunpoint, and buttressed by the Supreme Court’s willingness to convert unelected agencies into legislative superpowers.

Hayek warned us: once you substitute decentralized, voluntary exchanges for central planning, the latter will always expand. The regulatory state claims omniscience and benevolence, but produces only chaos, inefficiency, and stagnation. A top-down crusade against the very molecule of life, CO₂, has always amounted to an attack on human creativity, economic activity, and, indeed, civilization itself. The notion that productive enterprises—farms, factories, carmakers—should ask permission from the EPA to emit what every tree and blade of grass feeds upon, is the pinnacle of central planners’ arrogance.

Nozick’s minimal state—one limited to protection against force, theft, and fraud—has no place here. Every EPA “finding,” every so-called safeguard, is a shackle on human flourishing, a nudging toward a society of groveling supplicants rather than proud creators. The forced redistribution of wealth (through “carbon pricing” schemes), the stifling of voluntary exchange (“emission standards”), and the criminalization of peaceful enterprise are all signs of a bloated, illegitimate Leviathan lording over moral adults.

Ayn Rand laid it bare: “Man’s productive capacity is the root of all wealth.” How dare a state agency declare the very act of industry—a man producing, building, transporting—to be a crime? What is this if not the morality of sacrifice—sacrificing actual lives and well-being for the sake of a collectivist abstraction? Rand’s heroes would recognize these environmentalists for what they are: power-lusters wielding “the public good” as a club against the individual.

The protests from the environmental groups are the howling of priests deprived of their pulpit; their legal challenges are an attempt to cling to power illegitimately seized in an era of regulatory overreach. Let the market judge the risks, the costs, and the alternatives. Voluntary cooperation, not bureaucratic diktat, will discover better ways to address any real harms—if they exist—without sacrificing freedom.

Every rollback of state power is a victory. If this move genuinely guts the climate-regulation regime, then it is the single most moral political act by any administration in decades: a restoration of liberty against the smothering embrace of planned misery. Strip the state to its proper borders and let reason, choice, and production reign.