President Donald Trump is poised Thursday to revoke a landmark scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health by driving climate change -- a determination that underpins US regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming pollution.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt billed it as a “largest deregulatory action in American history,” with Trump to appear alongside Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin for the announcement.
“This revocation would be the single biggest attack in history on the United States federal government’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, president of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council told AFP.
The repeal is expected to be swiftly challenged in court.
The 2009 “endangerment finding” was a determination under then-president Barack Obama that six greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare by fueling climate change.
It came about as a result of a prolonged legal battle ending in a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act and directed the EPA to determine whether they pose a danger to public health and welfare.
While it initially applied only to vehicle emissions, it later became the legal foundation for a broader suite of climate regulations.
Thursday’s repeal is thus likely to be accompanied by scrapping federal greenhouse gas standards for automobiles.
But the consequences could ripple further, placing a host of climate rules in jeopardy -- including limits on carbon dioxide from power plants and methane from oil and gas operations.
The final text would be closely watched to see how it is framed, with the administration advancing procedural, scientific, and cost-based arguments.
Procedurally, the draft proposal asserted that greenhouse gases should not be treated as pollutants in the traditional sense because their effects on human health are indirect and global rather than local.
Regulating them within US borders, it contends, cannot meaningfully resolve a worldwide problem.
But attempts to re-cast the Clean Air Act as only focused on local and regional pollution would be “entirely flouting the law,” countered Bapna, noting the 1970 statute itself explicitly references pollution that affects “climate.”
The Supreme Court has re-affirmed the endangerment finding multiple times -- most recently in 2022, when the court’s composition was much the same as today.
The scientific arguments are just as shaky, critics say. The draft repeal sought to downplay the scale and impacts of human-caused climate change, citing a study commissioned by an Energy Department working group of skeptics to produce a report challenging the scientific consensus.
That report was widely panned by researchers, who said it was riddled with errors and, in some cases, misrepresented the very studies it cited. The working group itself was disbanded following a lawsuit by nonprofits that argued it was improperly convened.
And in September, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued its own report saying the evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute.
Finally, the administration has leaned heavily on putative cost savings, claiming repealing the endangerment finding would generate more than $1 trillion in regulatory savings, without detailing how the figure was calculated. It has also said it would lower new car costs.
Environmental advocates say that the administration is entirely ignoring the other side of the ledger, including lives saved from reduced pollution and fuel savings from more efficient vehicles.
They also warn the rollback would further skew the market toward more gas-guzzling cars, undermining the American auto industry’s ability to compete in the global race toward electric vehicles.
ia/dw
