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“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles,” wrote Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in The Meaning of It All. To sharpen the point, a legislature can fund research, an agency can set rules, a court can weigh evidence, but none of them can vote a physical law into being or out of existence. Nature does not check the Federal Register.
A principle is true if predictions match what is measured and false if they do not. Consensus, peer review, and an official summary do not change the measurement. Feynman’s warning was that once government treats a scientific claim as settled, dissent stops being a test of the claim and becomes a political offense. We at the CO2 Coalition have carried that distinction into comments, briefs, and active cases.
That test is now in court. In March 2026 we moved to intervene in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) repeal of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. We are uniquely qualified to make this case. The CO2 Coalition is a nonprofit of more than 200 scientists and researchers whose focus is carbon dioxide: its physics in the atmosphere, its effect on plants and crops, and the gap between what climate models say about its influence on atmospheric temperature and observations of real-world effects.
No other intervenor is putting that scientific record before the court. States and environmental groups are challenging EPA’s repeal of the Endangerment Finding, which had treated carbon dioxide from vehicles as a pollutant endangering public health and welfare. We will present data showing carbon dioxide is not a toxin and that there is no climate crisis.
Rising CO2 has already increased global plant growth and crop yields, especially in dry regions where plants use water more efficiently. Satellite records show a greener planet, and hundreds of studies document gains in food production from higher carbon dioxide.
The evidence is getting a hearing. We must keep the scientific method in the courtroom and secure abundant energy, higher crop yields, and the plant growth that comes with more CO2. The facts are on our side. Please help us make sure the courts cannot ignore them.
In The Meaning of It All, Feynman closed the same passage with the other half of the duty: Government has no right to decide which scientific principles are true. Instead, he wrote, it “has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
That is the freedom we are asking the D.C. Circuit to preserve—room to test the Endangerment Finding against the measurements, not against a claim already treated as settled.
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