The Trump EPA is set to cut the legs out from under U.S. climate change rules this week, revoking its own authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other pollutants heating the planet.
EPA’s plan to repeal the 16-year-old endangerment finding that said greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare represents the most aggressive step yet by President Donald Trump to reverse the policies and regulations aimed at slowing the pollution driving climate change.
The repeal, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said will be released Thursday, will erase the regulatory foundation for many of EPA’s climate rules under the Clean Air Act. It could also handcuff future Democratic presidents from using EPA to transition the nation’s fleets of automobiles and power plants to clean energy — even as experts around the world warn ever more significant action is needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“I think it’s a historic low, frankly, for EPA to be taking this stance now,” said Benjamin DeAngelo, a former EPA official who played a key role in writing the 2009 finding that is set to be repealed.
The move is part of the administration’s broader energy agenda to prop up what had been a financially ailing coal industry and secure the position of the oil and gas industry even as it takes aggressive steps to stymie wind and solar projects and electric vehicles that had been the focus of the Biden administration. The administration is actively seeking to ease the regulatory costs and open up new federal lands and waters for fossil fuel production and withdraw the United States from international climate treaties.
“This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” Leavitt said Tuesday. “This is just one more way this administration is working to make life more affordable for everyday Americans.”
The nation’s environmental regulator is expected to assert that EPA’s 2009 assessment of the threat greenhouse gases posed to public health and welfare was overblown, an opinion clashing with the vast majority of scientists.
It’s not clear to what extent EPA will hew to arguments made in the proposal it released last year that criticized mainstream climate science, highlighting uncertainties over the precise extent of future extreme weather and focusing instead on some narrow benefits of carbon dioxide. Those arguments were assailed by most scientists, and an Energy Department draft report challenging accepted climate science that EPA had based part of its proposal on ran into legal trouble for being written in secret by hand-picked contrarians.
Now, the agency is expected to lean on novel statutory arguments.
Even if climate change is real, the Clean Air Act is powerless to do almost anything about it, EPA is likely to argue in its new finding (Reg. 2060-AW71). Pollution from newly sold U.S. cars and trucks is a relatively small percentage of global pollution, EPA likely will say, even though the American transportation sector’s emissions outstrip those from most other nations’ entire economies — meaning climate change is a global phenomenon the U.S. cannot solve on its own.
EPA’s expected move has been hailed by conservatives who have long denied that human activity has played a large role in causing increasingly extreme weather or that climate change represents a global threat.
“It’s a bright new world. It’s much brighter than it was a year ago,” said Myron Ebell, who ran EPA’s transition team for Trump’s first term and has been working to repeal the finding since the ink was still wet.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended that removing the endangerment finding would eliminate the “holy grail” of climate policy. But the repeal may not have any significant impact on real-world efforts to lower carbon emissions, said Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Pielke said there’s no scientific or legal basis to an outright repeal of the finding because of how broadly the Clean Air Act is written.
“The practical effect of either rescinding or not rescinding the endangerment finding may be a lot less than most people wish it was,” he said. “It hasn’t itself led to profound changes in the U.S. economy or how we produce energy, and taking it away, similarly, is unlikely to do so as well.”
Questioning climate science to revoke the endangerment finding has long been viewed as a risky proposition given the mountains of research into its causes and effects.
Since EPA issued the finding in 2009, scientists have become only more certain about the dangers of greenhouse gases and have built out the research tying extreme weather to climate change, shifting it from a vague future threat to one that is causing damage right now.
So certain are most experts that one of the nation’s most venerated scientific bodies, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, conducted a review in response to EPA’s proposal and declared the reality and threat of climate change is now “beyond scientific dispute.”
“We obviously had a very solid scientific basis in 2009,” said DeAngelo, who left the federal government last year and now teaches at Howard University. “And I think that the scientific basis has stood the test of time quite well, and generally the science has only gotten stronger since then.”
EPA is expected to contend that the section of the Clean Air Act that regulates cars and trucks was designed to tackle pollution that hurts people “through local or regional exposure,” though that phrase does not appear in the law. Greenhouse gases impact people “only indirectly,” an unlawful exercise of EPA’s power, the agency argued in last year’s proposal, meaning that the harm of global climate change is too removed from emissions from a vehicle’s tailpipe to authorize regulations.
That misreads the Clean Air Act, said DeAngelo, who noted the law was successfully used in the 1980s to restrict chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer.
“Nowhere does it say in that act that the endangerment caused by the pollution must be local in nature. So that test in the Clean Air Act just isn’t there,” DeAngelo said.
While Republicans broadly opposed climate rules put out by the Obama and Biden administrations, actually undoing the finding was not a mainstream GOP plan, and after losing their initial challenges, fossil fuel industries settled into the new regulatory landscape. For many years, that left the fight against it to a small, close-knit group of advocates split between libertarian think tanks and organizations that sought to dispute climate science.
“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 Ebell.
Slow shifts in recent years brought the repeal effort from the scientific fringe to the White House. The plan could be helped by the new conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court, which ruled to limit EPA’s climate authority over power plants in 2022 and then gave judges more power to strike down regulations.
Defending the repeal in court could easily take until 2028, eating up Trump’s entire second term. A lengthy legal battle also risks wasting four years if the courts strike down the repeal and keep the endangerment finding in place, an outcome that would embolden a potential Democratic successor to issue new rules.
Despite the gamble, it follows a broader pattern as Trump has embraced a more strident approach toward eviscerating environmental rules.
Last time, the Trump EPA took time to issue replacements for the Obama climate rules it walked back. This time, EPA is trying to stop the regulation of greenhouse gases from vehicles and power plants entirely. And in his first term, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. This time, he went further, withdrawing completely from the United Nations’ decades-old climate convention, making the U.S. the only nation on the planet to refuse to even talk about addressing climate change.
Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who disputes consensus climate science, said prior to the release of the repeal that he expected the administration to rely on legal arguments only. The administration didn’t have time to construct a new basis on which to challenge the 2009 finding’s scientific assertions, he said, after the DOE report became embroiled in procedural “controversy.”
“I think the legal rationale should be enough, and everybody should understand that,” he said.
But he said officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget would have preferred to move a repeal that took on science head-on, even if it took longer. Regulatory office staff was concerned, he said, that courts might agree that EPA lacked legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases but still strike down the repeal because “they don’t want to be responsible for millions of people being killed or the destruction of the planet.”
Jean Chemnick contributed to this report.
