Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1963 to regulate local pollution around the country, and regulators did that for decades. In 2009, the EPA decided it would treat greenhouse gases like other pollutants, based on their global damage than local.
Congress needs to pass a new law, because the benefits of regulating greenhouse gases vastly outweigh the economic costs neeed to avert increasingly severe damage caused by climate change — deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday formally revoked its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, eliminating the legal foundation for virtually all federal climate regulations and handing the fossil fuel industry a victory it has pursued for nearly two decades.
The decision, signed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at a White House event promoting coal production, erases the scientific determination that carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping pollutants threaten Americans’ well-being.
That finding, issued in response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, had authorized the agency to limit emissions from vehicles, power plants and industrial facilities under the Clean Air Act.
Without it, the EPA has no authority to regulate the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gases.
“This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The administration’s own scientific advisors, along with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, have told the EPA in formal comments that the evidence for climate change causing current and future harm is “beyond scientific dispute.”
The World Economic Forum reported that climate change damages are costing the world approximately $16 million per hour, with total annual losses projected to soar to $38 trillion by 2050.
There are also immeasurable effects from extreme weather, such as trauma, loss of educational access, and job loss that would further increase the costs.
Since 2009, scientists have only grown more certain: annual heat-wave frequency has tripled, seas have risen faster, and attribution science now directly links individual extreme weather events to human-caused warming.
The EPA is not disputing that the planet is warming. Instead, it argues the Clean Air Act was never intended to address global pollution — only local or regional threats. That phrase does not appear in the law.
“Nowhere does it say in that act that the endangerment caused by the pollution must be local in nature,” said Benjamin DeAngelo, a former EPA official who helped write the 2009 finding and now teaches at Howard University. “So that test in the Clean Air Act just isn’t there.”
The Supreme Court has already settled this question. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the court ruled 5-4 that greenhouse gases fit the Clean Air Act’s “sweeping definition” of air pollutants and that the agency could not decline to regulate them based on policy preferences.
All five justices in the majority are now dead or retired, and the current conservative supermajority has signaled openness to narrowing federal agencies’ authority.
In 2022, the court limited how the EPA may regulate power plant emissions under the so-called major questions doctrine. Last year, it overturned the 40-year-old Chevron deference, which had required judges to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws.
Those decisions have emboldened the administration to test whether Massachusetts remains valid law.
“We’ve had an administrative law revolution,” said Matthew Leopold, the EPA’s general counsel in Trump’s first term, speaking at a forum last fall.
The administration’s legal argument carries significant risk. If the Supreme Court upholds the repeal and effectively reverses Massachusetts, Congress would have to pass new legislation to address climate change — something it has failed to do for three decades despite worsening disasters and mounting economic costs.
If the court strikes down the repeal, the endangerment finding remains in place, and the administration will have spent four years litigating a rule that never took effect.
For progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick, the moment represents another massive failure of Sen. Cory Booker.
“During Senator Cory Booker’s entire tenure in Washington, the fight against climate change has rested on a regulation that Republicans could easily repeal,” said McCormick. “Booker’s failure to codify the Endangerment Finding, which allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, is just as irresponsible as his failure to make the principles behind Roe vs Wade the law of the land.”
The endangerment finding has functioned as climate policy by regulatory proxy since 2009, never codified into law despite multiple Democratic trifectas.
The same vulnerability that allowed Trump to revoke it this week could have been closed by statute in any of those years. It was not.
“This is the culmination of a lot of effort over a lot of time by a lot of people who didn’t give up, unlike people in industry and business, in the oil industry,” said Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s first EPA transition and has worked to repeal the finding since 2009.
The public health consequences, environmental groups say, will be immediate and unevenly distributed.
The EPA’s own analysis of the now-rescinded vehicle standards had projected they would prevent 82,000 premature deaths and 25.5 million asthma attacks through 2055.
Communities near highways and fossil fuel facilities, disproportionately low-income and nonwhite, face the highest exposure to the pollution the agency will no longer limit.
Texas, which leads the nation in vehicle emissions and operates more coal plants than any other state, will see the largest increases in mercury, particulate matter and carbon dioxide.
The EPA simultaneously rolled back mercury and air toxics standards for power plants and extended deadlines for coal ash cleanup, decisions the agency said would ease regulatory burdens on industry.
“Pollution from fossil fuels kills thousands of Americans every year, increases our electricity prices and makes our nation less secure,” said Emma Pabst, a campaign manager for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “But the Trump administration’s wealthy friends who own coal, gas and data centers don’t want you to think about the deaths and sickness and high bills. They want you to look away.”
“America is like a car speeding toward the edge of a cliff, but as the reckless, corporate-captured GOP is flooring the gas pedal, the comfortable, donor-driven Democratic establishment insists on maintaining the current speed, as if cruise control will save us,” said McCormick. “No one in Washington is trying to slam on the brakes.”
“Trump offered to take official actions to benefit oil and gas companies in exchange for $1 billion in political contributions to his presidential campaign,” said McCormick. Trump reportedly proposed a quid pro quo: in return for $1 billion in campaign contributions from oil and gas executives, he would commit to enacting specific regulatory and tax policies favored by the industry if reelected.
The administration has not presented new scientific evidence to justify its reversal. Its original 2025 proposal relied in part on a Department of Energy draft report written by five scientists who have long disputed mainstream climate science.
A federal judge ruled the energy secretary broke the law in establishing that advisory committee without regard to transparency and fairness provisions. The final repeal pivots to statutory arguments instead.
Several major automakers did not comment on Thursday’s announcement. Industry representatives have privately expressed concern that abandoning emissions standards will cede the electric vehicle market to Chinese manufacturers, who now produce more than half the world’s EVs and face no similar regulatory retreat at home.
The United States is now the only nation on Earth that has withdrawn from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992 treaty that serves as the foundational international agreement on global warming.
Trump completed that withdrawal last month, making the U.S. the sole observer to talks every other country continues to attend.
Legal challenges to the endangerment finding repeal were filed within hours of its announcement by a coalition of 22 states, environmental groups and public health organizations.
The cases will be consolidated before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where seven of 11 active judges were appointed by Democratic presidents. Whatever that court decides, the losing party is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The litigation could take three years or more, consuming the remainder of Trump’s term. If the repeal is struck down, a future Democratic administration could restore the endangerment finding and reissue emissions rules.
If it is upheld, the Clean Air Act will no longer constrain the nation’s largest source of climate pollution.
Congress could settle the question with a law. It has not done so. The 2009 endangerment finding was always a workaround — a regulation standing in for legislation that never came. Thursday, the workaround was revoked.
“The business community would like to have the long-term certainty that would come with bipartisan legislation,” said Jeff Holmstead, a partner at Bracewell who served as EPA air chief under President George W. Bush.
Holmstead does not expect that to happen during this administration.
Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said his organization would challenge the decision in court.
“This decision is now endangering all of it — and all of us,” Krupp said.
The EPA’s action takes effect upon publication in the Federal Register, expected next week.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.