BREAKING: Enviros sue Trump EPA over endangerment finding repeal
The Clean Air Act rule has been used to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and power plants.
A coalition of over a dozen environmental and public health groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, seeking to block the Trump administration’s repeal of a cornerstone rule used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
The lawsuit filed in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of several that are expected after the EPA finalized its repeal of the so-called endangerment finding, which has been used to justify regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks and power plants.
The challengers include the American Public Health Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club and others.
“Nobody but Big Oil profits from Trump trashing climate science and making cars and trucks guzzle and pollute more,” said David Pettit, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Consumers will pay more to fill up, and our skies and oceans will fill up with more pollution.”
He continued: “The EPA’s rollbacks are based on political poppycock, not science or law, and the courts should see it that way.”
The EPA said last week when it unveiled the repeal that it was doing so after deciding that the 2009 rule exceeded the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act (CAA) which the Trump administration views as limited to regional pollution and not carbon emissions that cause global climate change.
The CAA does not make a direct distinction between global or regional pollution, and the endangerment finding was originally finalized after the Supreme Court said in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA that the CAA covers greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding has provided the legal framework on which the EPA has regulated six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane.
While the endangerment finding most directly relates to the part of the CAA that regulates emissions from cars and trucks, section 202(a), the finding has been used to justify virtually every major climate rule in the U.S., including rules to rein in power plant emissions.
In comments submitted last year, 22 Democratic state attorneys general plus their municipal counterparts from around a half dozen major cities had previewed their legal arguments. That group of attorneys general is also expected to challenge the rule shortly.
The group, led by Massachusetts, said that the CAA “clearly directs that greenhouse gases are pollutants” under the law, adding that the Supreme Court “unequivocally held that greenhouse gases are air pollutants subject to” the law in the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA case.
“The executive branch cannot re-write Congress’s work or overrule the Supreme Court because it would prefer to prioritize its own policy preferences over the law,” the group said.
You can read Landmark’s coverage of last week’s announcement here, and our analysis of the legal arguments in the original rule right here.