President Donald Trump called climate change “a giant scam” when announcing the repeal of the endangerment finding Thursday. But his own administration deleted sections from the rule claiming that climate science is exaggerating the dangers of rising temperatures.
As of Thursday night, the text of the repeal had not been posted on EPA’s website. But three people who participated in a phone briefing Thursday with EPA air chief Aaron Szabo said they were told the agency chose to leave science on the cutting room floor. The people were granted anonymity to discuss a private conversation.
EPA instead chose to justify the repeal with legal arguments alone.
The 2009 finding — which says that greenhouse gases harm human health and welfare — is based on a robust scientific record linking human-caused emissions to dangerous warming. It served as the legal and scientific justification for most federal rules that combat climate change, including limits on carbon and methane emissions for cars and power plants.
EPA’s draft repeal took aim at that scientific record, citing a Department of Energy report by five hand-picked contrarians that has since been rebuked by the courts and criticized by DOE career scientists. Those provisions are now gone, according to the people briefed on the final rule’s text.
Trump has long criticized mainstream climate science, calling it a “hoax” intended to weaken the United States. He did so again during a White House rollout event Thursday, where he slammed climate change and policies to contain it as “all a scam, a giant scam. A rip-off.”
“This determination had no basis in fact — had none whatsoever — and it had no basis in law,” Trump said of the Obama-era finding.
The Thursday afternoon call was held to brief people who had been supportive of EPA’s endangerment repeal on the final rule.
Participants were told that there would be no science-based justification for the rollback. Instead, EPA will argue that the Clean Air Act only empowers the agency to regulate pollutants that pose a direct danger to the public from exposure. EPA will also claim that the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision striking down an Obama-era power plant rule prohibited EPA from regulating global pollution and that U.S. sectors like new vehicles contribute so little to global warming that they don’t warrant regulation.
The repeal aims to prevent future administrations from limiting climate pollution without new action by Congress. Environmentalists and Democratic-controlled states will mount a legal challenge that could drag on for years and reach the Supreme Court.
