President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories.
The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change.
The finding — which the EPA issued in 2009 — said that the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations.
“We are officially terminating the so called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama era policy,” Trump said in a Thursday news conference. “This determination had no basis in fact — none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world.”
The Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that EPA had the authority to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases and acknowledged that harms associated with climate change are “serious and well recognized,” which led to the agency’s creation of the endangerment finding two years later.
If climate change law was a tower in the game Jenga, the endangerment finding would be a wooden block at the base. It underpinned the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles and power plants and to mandate that companies report their emissions. It required the federal government to take action on climate under the Clean Air Act.
The White House and EPA have called the repeal “the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
The move is the Trump administration’s most significant attempt yet to diminish efforts to address climate change. The U.S. officially left the Paris agreement for the second time last month and is also expected to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, leaving the U.S. without a meaningful voice in global climate talks.
Trump, who has called climate change a “con job,” canceled nearly $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects in October (though a judge later ruled that some of those terminations were unlawful). And the Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it will spend $175 million to extend the life of six coal plants — the latest in a series of moves to prop up coal.
Last year was the third-warmest in modern history, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate change service. The last 11 years have been the 11 hottest ever recorded.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin listens to a question after a discussion with residents and business owners affected by the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles on Feb. 4.Mario Tama / Getty Images
The EPA is also removing all greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles. The agency will, however, still regulate pollutants in tailpipe emissions that hamper air quality, such as carbon monoxide, lead and ozone.
“We are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emissions standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond,” Trump said.
The administration has said it is reconsidering other policies that hinge on the endangerment finding, as well, including regulations on methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Wednesday on Fox Business that repealing the finding would boost the coal industry.
“CO₂ [carbon dioxide] was never a pollutant,” he said. “The whole endangerment thing opens up the opportunity for the revival of clean, beautiful American coal.” (Aside from its role in warming the planet, high concentrations of indoor CO2 can hamper human cognition.)
Environmental groups have been anticipating the EPA’s announcement for months and preparing to sue in response.
“Put simply, this is a gift-wrapped package for the fossil fuel industry. It is unscientific, it is bad economics, and it is illegal, so we’re going to fight it,” Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said at a news briefing last month. “We will see them in court.”
After President Trump’s announcement on Thursday, several other organizations announced their intention to sue, including the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association, the Alliance for Nurses for Healthy Environments and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
“As organizations committed to protecting public health, we will challenge this unlawful repeal,” the organizations said in a statement.
The expected legal battle will almost assuredly take years to resolve, with the administration’s justifications for its repeal up against ample scientific evidence of climate change’s harms in court.
In its draft of the rule repealing the endangerment finding, the EPA argued that it had overstated the risks of heat waves, projected more global warming than had taken place and discounted benefits of increases in carbon emissions, like increased plant growth. Independent science organizations have dismissed many of those arguments and pushed back against a controversial Energy Department report that the EPA cited in its proposal.
“The climate is changing faster than ever before, driven by human activities, and the resulting impacts on people and the world we depend on are becoming ever more dire,” the American Geophysical Union said in a statement about the Energy Department report.
“The changing climate is directly causing or exacerbating global average temperature increases and heat waves, sea level rise and storm surge, and ocean acidification, and is causing extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and drought to occur with greater frequency, intensity, or both.”
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