Trump’s EPA finalizes repeal of the endangerment finding. A bitter legal fight is coming.
'I'll see them in court,' Massachusetts' attorney general responded.
The Trump administration has finished its work repealing one of the most consequential climate change rules in U.S. history known as the endangerment finding, Environmental Protection Agency Administer Lee Zeldin announced on Thursday.
Speaking alongside President Donald Trump in the White House Roosevelt Room — a room named after former presidents who championed environmental conservation — Zeldin said he is “proud to deliver the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history on behalf of American taxpayers and consumers.”
The 2009 endangerment finding expanded the scope of pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, determining that six greenhouse gases — including carbon dioxide and methane — threaten public health and welfare.
While it most directly relates to the section of that law that regulates emissions from motor vehicles, 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.
The EPA’s move will undoubtedly trigger a long and fierce legal fight between the EPA and Democratic-led attorneys general and environmental groups.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, whose office was integral in the earlier legal fight to force the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases, had a curt message for the administration: “I’ll see them in court.”
“EPA’s unlawful rescission of the 2009 endangerment finding shows just how far this administration will go to grant favors to polluters—ignoring clear Supreme Court precedent, basic facts, and decades of scientific research, all at the expense of our health and welfare,” she said in a statement.
The deregulatory move comes as a part of Trump’s broader efforts to eliminate roadblocks standing in the way of oil, gas and coal development. Zeldin also said that the EPA had finalized a rule to “off-cycle credits,” which encourage automakers to install devices that automatically shut off engines to avoid burning gas while idling.
When it unveiled the proposed repeal back in August, the EPA argued that the agency had overstepped its legal authority when making the original rule. That’s despite the Supreme Court itself saying in its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that the court had “little trouble concluding” that the Clean Air Act allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.
The agency relied on two recent Supreme Court decisions that said agency action with major economic or political implications must be explicitly authorized by Congress, and restricted agencies from filling in the blanks on ambiguous statutes.
Those arguments will now be tested in court, first by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then, potentially, by the Supreme Court itself.
The near-term impacts appear to be some level of uncertainty for the auto industry (though it appears unlikely that major auto makers will retool their production lines while legal challenges play out), and potential uncertainty for other industries as the EPA uses the endangerment finding repeal to undercut other rules that have sprung from it.
The decision could also spur states like California to consider whether, by saying the Clean Air Act doesn’t authorize regulations for greenhouse gases, it can craft more robust rules of its own. The Clean Air Act typically preempts state laws.
(Seemingly cognizant of public image and the potential headaches from near-term regulatory uncertainty, Ford Motors told the EPA in comments submitted in September that customer demand is rising for plug-in hybrid vehicles and that modest vehicle emissions regulations would be helpful to maintain.)
That same thinking could also help states and municipalities in lawsuits that claim the oil and gas industry should help pay for damages caused by climate change, since they misled the public about the dangers of burning oil and manufactured reliance on their products for decades.
A key defense by the fossil fuel industry in those cases is that those state law claims are pre-empted by the Clean Air Act, and the American Petroleum Institute said in comments submitted on the proposed endangerment finding repeal that it supported only a narrow repeal that is limited to emissions from cars and trucks. In other words, the federal government can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, just not from one of the largest sources of climate-warming pollution.
Environmental groups have warned in recent days that the repeal would lead to more climate-warming emissions, which means more ferocious and destabilizing storms, droughts and wildfires. All of that means more economic impacts as climate change strains the country’s insurance, supply chain and public health systems.
“Zeldin’s decision is not supported by the science, which shows that the pace of global warming is accelerating faster than expected,“ said Dominique Browning, the co-founder of the Moms Clean Air Task Force.
She continued: “It is not supported by public health data, by economics, by morality, or even, simply, stewardship of our Earth. It is not supported by the very evidence we are all feeling at home every month, as heat waves intensify and storms are turbocharged.”