The Trump administration just eliminated the landmark finding that has underpinned federal regulations on planet-heating pollution since 2009.
For nearly the past two decades, the “endangerment finding” has allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to craft rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Rather than repealing those rules individually, the Trump administration can undermine them all at once by attacking the endangerment finding.
Today, the EPA finalized its plans to overturn the endangerment finding as part of its attempts to overhaul tailpipe pollution standards. The move could also affect efforts to curb carbon emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities that drive more extreme weather and other climate disasters. And since the US pumps out more of the carbon pollution causing climate change than any other country in the world other than China, the impact would be felt worldwide.
“It is impossible to imagine a morally defensible reason”
“It is impossible to imagine a morally defensible reason for [EPA] Administrator [Lee] Zeldin’s decision to end EPA’s responsibility for cutting the climate pollution that is endangering peoples’ health,” Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force director and cofounder, said in an emailed press statement. “Zeldin’s legacy will be the suffering of our children and grandchildren.”
In 2009, when the EPA issued the endangerment finding, it recognized that greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The World Health Organization has warned that there could be an additional 250,000 deaths annually between 2030 and 2050 due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress exacerbated by climate change.
Now, the EPA says it’s focused on slashing regulations it sees as costly for US businesses and consumers. When the agency first proposed a repeal of the endangerment finding last year, it claimed that automakers “have suffered from significant uncertainties and massive costs related to general regulations of greenhouse gases from vehicles and trucks.”
The agency announced today that it’s throwing out “all subsequent federal GHG emission standards for all vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond” by eliminating the endangerment finding. “As EPA Administrator, I am proud to deliver the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history on behalf of American taxpayers and consumers,” Zeldin said in the press release.
The agency now says that removing regulatory requirements for greenhouse gases will cumulatively save more than $1.3 trillion, shaving $2,400 on average off the cost of a vehicle (without sharing in the press release how it arrived at that amount). The EPA previously estimated that the repeal would save $54 billion annually, although its analysis assumes that gas prices will fall and excludes additional costs incurred by the effects of climate change. Undoing tailpipe pollution rules by rescinding the endangerment finding could actually cost Americans $310 billion over the next 25 years — mostly at the gas pump — according to a report by nonpartisan climate policy think tank Energy Innovation.
The repeal is sure to face legal challenges from environmental groups. That could ultimately send the case to the Supreme Court, where President Donald Trump has appointed three of the justices making up the current 6-3 conservative majority. If that happens, the current justices could reverse the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision that allowed the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in the first place. By doing so, they’d hamstring future administrations from reinstating climate rules enabled by the endangerment finding.
Congress would have to enact legislation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions again at the federal level. In its announcement today, the EPA argues that the Clean Air Act does not give the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions coming from motor vehicles “for the purpose of addressing global climate change.” “A policy decision of this magnitude, which carries sweeping economic and policy consequences, lies solely with Congress,” it says.
States could also step up with their own climate pollution limits. “We can’t allow federal attacks to limit Colorado’s clean transportation ambitions,” Aaron Kressig, transportation electrification manager at the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, said in a press release. “Now is the time for state leaders to take bold action.”
Navigating a web of different state policies could lead to greater legal risks for automakers, according to Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association. “Rescinding the endangerment finding creates huge risk and uncertainty in the regulatory framework on which sustained economic growth has depended for decades,” Gore says in a press statement. “[It] pulls the rug out from companies that have invested in manufacturing next-gen vehicles across the United States.”
