EPA No Longer Believes Greenhouse Gas Emissions Threaten Public Health

The Environmental Protection Agency no longer believes that greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health and welfare.

On Thursday afternoon, the Trump administration finalized the long-awaited repeal of what’s known as the “endangerment finding.”

The endangerment finding was first reached in 2009, and concluded that the planet-warming effects of greenhouse gasses were dangerous to the public. The finding forms the basis for all EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from trucks, cars, power plants and other sources of pollution.

Trump called the repeal the “single largest deregulatory action in American history” at a Thursday press conference alongside EPA administrator Lee Zeldin.

Zeldin said the endangerment finding “regulated and targeted the American dream.”

Alongside the repeal of the endangerment finding, the EPA also completely removed its vehicle emissions standards. The agency in July first proposed rescinding both rules, and the endangerment finding proposal received hundreds of thousands of comments during the public comment period.

The repeals of both the finding and the vehicle emissions rules will be immediately challenged in court and could face years of litigation. Andrea Joy Campbell, the Massachusetts Attorney General, immediately said: “I’ll see them in court.”

And both the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council committed to suing the EPA over its decision seconds after the repeal was finalized. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups immediately said they were pursuing all avenues to challenge the repeal, including possible litigation.

“EDF will challenge this decision in court, where evidence matters, and keep working with everyone who wants to build a better, safer and more prosperous future,” said Fred Krupp, EDF’s president, in a press release.

“We will see them in court – and we will win,” said Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of NRDC, in a press release.

Legal experts anticipate the EPA will face a tough fight in the courts because of years of precedent that support the endangerment finding.

In 2007, the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gasses are air pollutants and required the EPA to assess whether they endanger public health, which then led to the enactment of the 2009 endangerment finding. The court declined to hear a challenge to the finding in 2012, reaffirming its status.

Since the 2009 finding, the evidence that greenhouse gas emissions pose a risk to public health has only strengthened.

In July, when the EPA first proposed repealing the finding, the agency attempted to counter the evidence about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change with a report commissioned by the Department of Energy. The report was widely panned by the scientific community, including by at least ten researchers who told NOTUS that their own work was misrepresented and inaccurately cited within the report.

“This determination had no basis in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law,” Trump said Thursday.

The planned repeal of the endangerment finding has not been entirely popular, even within the oil and gas industry. Mike Sommers, the chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, told reporters in January that API does not support the repeal of the endangerment finding for “stationary sources,” which include power plants and drilling sites.

“We do support the federal regulation of methane, and we’re focused on reducing our emissions as an industry, so we want them to maintain the endangerment finding for stationary sources,” he said.

The EPA has also separately proposed eliminating the greenhouse gas reporting program, which companies use to report their annual emissions to the agency. Sommers told reporters this week that API is working on a possible industry-led alternative to replace the program if the EPA removes it, because API believes the program is important and should continue to exist.