A coalition of environmental and public health groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday to try to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from repealing its conclusion that climate change poses a significant risk to public health and welfare.
The petition for review, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, came six days after the EPA made its long-awaited announcement that it would be abandoning the Obama-era “endangerment finding.” The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club and more than 10 other related groups.
The endangerment finding, from 2009, serves as the basis for all federal regulations that govern greenhouse gas emissions. Without it, the EPA would be unable to regulate pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane and would be unable to take actions to try to slow the rate of global warming.
“The Trump EPA’s slapdash legal arguments should be laughed out of court. Undercutting the ability of the federal government to tackle the largest source of climate pollution is deadly serious, but the administration’s legal and scientific reasons for doing so are a joke,” said Meredith Hankins, the legal director for federal climate issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
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This suit is likely the first of several to challenge the agency’s actions. State attorneys general for Massachusetts and Colorado have also threatened legal action after President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin made the joint repeal announcement last week.
Before Zeldin’s tenure, EPA leadership had never seriously considered repealing the endangerment finding because the scientific conclusions about global warming and its risks have only strengthened since 2009.
The Obama-era EPA only pursued the endangerment finding because of a 2007 Supreme Court conclusion that greenhouse gases should be considered air pollutants.
Some legal experts anticipate the EPA will have a hard time defending the repeal in court given the legal basis for the original decision, but the EPA appears to be betting that today’s much more conservative Supreme Court will approach the question very differently than it did in 2007.
The coalition of environmental and public health groups did not immediately file any legal text about the basis of their arguments against the repeal, instead filing just a notice to the court of their petition for review.
EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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