The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday plans to repeal the legal framework that underpins its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“President Trump will be joined by Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the rescission of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing on Tuesday. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations.”
Known as the endangerment finding, the EPA’s 2009 decision says that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are heating the Earth and that warming threatens public health and welfare. It therefore functions, under the Clean Air Act, as the lynchpin for rules that set emissions standards for cars and trucks and require fossil fuel companies to report their emissions, among others.
The move is expected to upend most U.S. policies aimed at reducing climate pollution — if the repeal can withstand court challenges from environmental groups, which had already been preparing to sue.
The text of the rule repealing the finding has not yet been released, so many details are still unknown. However, the EPA released a draft version in August, which also proposed removing all greenhouse gas emissions standards for motor vehicles. Leavitt said the EPA’s planned deregulation would reduce the costs of cars, SUVs and trucks — an indication that the final draft may also include the vehicle emissions rollback.
Other climate regulations could soon come toppling down, as well: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed a rule in June to repeal carbon dioxide standards for power plants and has promised that the EPA will reconsider other policies that rely on the endangerment finding, including regulations on methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
In a briefing with reporters last month in advance of the EPA’s decision, Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the expected repeal “the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis.”
“More and more people are suffering from man-made disasters, from heartbreaking flooding in Texas and North Carolina, to the horrific fire around Los Angeles, to the record heat waves that now hit every summer. Eliminating the endangerment finding is denying these events and the existence of climate change writ large,” Bapna said.
The conservative think tank The Heartland Institute, on the other hand, applauded the coming change.
“The Obama administration’s determination that CO2 endangered human health and welfare was scientifically flawed and blatant political pandering,” said James Taylor, the organization’s president.
The endangerment finding was implemented during President Barack Obama’s first term. Now, however, the EPA says that the decision “unreasonably analyzed the scientific record” and that its scientific underpinnings were too pessimistic and haven’t been borne out.
In its preliminary draft of the rule, the EPA said the endangerment finding had overstated the risk of heat waves, projected more potential warming than has taken place and discounted the benefits of increases to carbon pollution, like increased plant growth. Prominent science groups have disputed those arguments.
The agency also said that court decisions since 2009, like West Virginia v. EPA, have already narrowed its power to regulate greenhouse gases. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA does not have broad authority on its own to shift energy production away from coal plants toward cleaner sources.
The agency pinned many of the arguments in its preliminary rule on a controversial report commissioned by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. A judge ruled last month that Wright and the Energy Department had violated transparency laws in the way it formed and operated the working group behind the report.
It’s not clear whether the final rule will rely on the same arguments or change its justifications in response to public comments.
In their pushback against the EPA’s draft rule, science groups took particular aim at the DOE report, which described increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as having a “greening” benefit for the planet. The report also said there is not a clear trend in the frequency of extreme weather events, and that attributing them to climate change is difficult because of “natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”
The American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit scientific society, said the report presented “inaccurate and cherry-picked” information.
“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 union said in a statement, noting that greenhouse gases were higher than at any other time in the last 800,000 years.
“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.”
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued its own report about the endangerment finding, concluding that it was accurate and stood the test of time.
Additionally, a group of 85 climate scientists submitted a point-by-point rebuttal of the DOE report in public comments, writing that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation” and “does not meet standards of quality, utility, objectivity and integrity appropriate for use in supporting policy making.”
Last year was the third-warmest in modern history, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, Copernicus data shows.
Under President Donald Trump, the EPA has pursued an aggressive rollback of environmental regulations. Zeldin promised in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year that he would drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.”
The rollback of the endangerment finding will prompt a major court battle, however.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has promised to fight the EPA “every step of the way.” One of its lawyers, David Doniger, has said it will be “impossible” for the agency to defend its rule change in court because there’s a “Denali-size” mountain of evidence showing that greenhouse gas pollution is fueling climate change and intensifying harms like wildfires, floods and heat waves.
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