By Evan Bush
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 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 at a 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.”
Major environmental groups have disputed the administration’s stance on the endangerment finding and have been preparing to sue in response to its repeal.
The endangerment finding 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 Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the 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 creation of the endangerment finding two years later.
The White House and the EPA have said repealing the finding would be “the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
It’s the Trump administration’s most significant attempt yet to diminish efforts to address climate change. The U.S. officially left the 2015 Paris Agreement for the second time last month and is also expected to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, leaving America 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 Energy Department announced Wednesday that it will spend $175 million to extend the lives 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.
Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also announced Thursday that the agency is removing all greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles.
“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 EPA will still regulate pollutants in tailpipe emissions that hamper air quality, such as carbon monoxide, lead and ozone.
Former President Barack Obama, whose administration established the endangerment finding, said in a statement Thursday that without it, Americans will be “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change, all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”
The U.S. Climate Alliance, which is led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, said the repeal was “unlawful, ignores basic science, and denies reality.”
Several organizations have already announced their intention to sue, including the American Lung Association and the American Public Health Association.
“As organizations committed to protecting public health, we will challenge this unlawful repeal,” they said in a statement.
At a news briefing last month, Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it was also preparing a legal challenge, calling the expected repeal “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. We will see them in court,” he said.
The legal battles could take years to resolve, with the administration’s justifications for its repeal up against ample scientific evidence of climate change’s harms in court.
Michael Gerrard, the founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the future of the repeal could ultimately rely on the Supreme Court, which would have to overturn a 16-year-old precedent.
“The 2007 decision was a five-to-four decision, and all five of the judges in the majority are either deceased or retired. Of the four dissenters, three are still on the court,” Gerrard said. “Usually, what the courts require when an agency takes a stark change in its position is a good explanation of that with a lot of documentation behind it.”
Meghan Greenfield, a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block who oversaw the Supreme Court docket for EPA rulemaking during the Biden administration, said the administration could face an uphill battle in court because of existing legal precedent and the strong scientific evidence of climate change and its harms. The administration will also have to show that it followed the right process in issuing the rule, she said.
“Typically, a rule like this would take about three years to complete. This has been done within about a year,” she said. “You only get to the interesting legal issues once you make sure that you dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s.”
The EPA had not published the final text of its rule as of 4 p.m. ET Thursday and did not respond to questions about when it would be made available.
In its August draft proposal, the agency 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.
“The EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding was grounded in this extensive body of research,” The American Geophysical Union said in a statement Thursday. “The Trump Administration’s decision to repeal this landmark scientific and legal determination — despite the overwhelming evidence — is a rejection of established science, a denial of the struggles we are facing today, and a direct threat to our collective future.”
The administration has already said it is reconsidering other policies that hinge on the endangerment finding, 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.”
