Trump Guts Basis For Climate Regulation, Setting Up A Courtroom Clash

President Donald Trump’s campaign to quash climate change policies notched its biggest win yet on Thursday, as EPA eliminated the legal basis for regulations aimed at restricting greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks that are heating the planet.

The repeal of the 2009 “endangerment finding” that served as the regulatory basis for a swath of rules limiting pollution from sources like cars, trucks and power plants comes as the Environmental Protection Agency has moved to roll back regulations it says burden businesses and hinder economic growth. The administration says the move will save companies more than $1 trillion, but critics argue that ignores the much greater costs of climate change from extreme weather, sea level rise and heat-related health impacts.

"We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers," Trump said in announcing the repeal.

Trump has aided the oil, natural gas and coal industries while slowing or stopping the expansion of electric vehicles and solar and wind power. On Wednesday, he gathered coal miners at the White House to announce a raft of new measures aimed at reviving a fuel that has suffered sharp declines in the past two decades amid tightening pollution rules.

Now, the elimination of the endangerment finding represents a foundational statement that the nation’s powerful clean air law can do almost nothing about the pollution driving climate change.

Environmentalists and Democratic-controlled states will mount a fierce legal challenge to the repeal (Reg. 2060-AW71), which also lifts all greenhouse gas standards for vehicles ranging from sedans to 18-wheelers, the sector representing the largest chunk of U.S. emissions.

“We're going to be taking this fight to the courtroom, and we are going to win,” Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said at a Wednesday rally outside EPA headquarters.

Joe Goffman, who ran EPA’s air office in the Biden administration and wrote many of the climate rules now being repealed, scoffed at the Trump administration’s reasoning for eliminating the finding.

“Asking the American people to believe that climate pollution no longer poses a danger is, frankly, stupid,” he said. “It's especially stupid since it asks us to deny what we see with our own eyes.”

Rather than challenging established climate science, EPA’s primary argument is that the Clean Air Act was never intended to allow for regulation of greenhouse gases because climate change is a global phenomenon. EPA, it argued, had only ever regulated pollution with direct health impacts or that could create regional issues like acid rain, and should stick to that. Such a limitation, however, is not expressed in the law itself.

The agency had initially mounted an attack on climate science itself, arguing that most scientists have overblown both the impact and harms of climate pollution, a conclusion based on a draft Energy Department report written in secret by a handful of scientists known for contrarian views on climate change. DOE was forced to halt that group’s work in recent months after a judge said it had run afoul of federal laws for advisory committees meant to promote transparency and balance.

Many scientists, meanwhile, pushed back on EPA’s claims, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said last fall that the scientific case for climate change has only strengthened over the past decade and a half.

“Much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved and new threats have been identified,” NASEM’s report said.

Ultimately, the administration is banking that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will uphold the repeal. That would mark a sea change at the high court from almost two decades ago, when the court issued a landmark ruling finding that greenhouse gases count as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, effectively setting a mandate for EPA to regulate.

Republicans and industry have vehemently opposed the subsequent regulations on vehicles, power plants and the oil and gas sector, and now believe that the high court’s conservative supermajority — which was created by Trump and congressional Republicans in his first term and has since reined in EPA’s authority — is ready to do a U-turn on climate change.

“The new and improved Supreme Court has helped tremendously” in convincing the administration to repeal the finding, said Myron Ebell, Trump's first-term EPA transition leader and a long-time opponent of the finding. “I think a lot of people felt that in [Trump’s first term] that they couldn't actually win at the Supreme Court level.”

Whether the justices will uphold the endangerment finding repeal — and in doing so, throw into chaos decades of climate law and liability — remains to be seen. The court battle likely will take much of the rest of Trump’s time in office.

But supporters of climate action argue the Trump administration’s reasoning is pretextual.

“Science did not change when Donald Trump was inaugurated,” Goffman said. “What did change was the arrival of new EPA management determined to destroy the agency's public health and environmental mission.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) argued the repeal is part of a broader "scheme" in which the Trump administration is blocking clean energy because it has become cheaper than fossil fuels.

"That means when the clean energy isn't there, the grid has to climb up the generation stack to fossil fuel plants that would not otherwise be running," Whitehouse said. "It is a massive transfer of wealth from electric utility ratepayers to Trump's big fossil fuel donors."

In addition to repealing the endangerment finding and its related vehicle standards, EPA is working to revoke the Biden administration's climate rule for power plants as well as a long-standing requirement forcing major industries to report their greenhouse gas emissions.

The agency is also considering significant changes to the oil and gas industry rule limiting emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas that is a powerful driver of near-term warming when it’s released unburned.