The Trump administration delivered a deadly blow to longstanding US climate policy on Thursday, finalizing rules that revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution.
First issued in 2009, the endangerment finding determined that six greenhouse gases could be categorized as dangerous to human health under the Clean Air Act. It has underpinned the EPA’s authority to limit planet-warming pollution from the oil and gas industry, power plants and vehicles since the Obama administration and is considered the federal government’s most powerful tool to tackle climate pollution and the country’s contribution to the global crisis.
“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding,” President Donald Trump said on Thursday, calling the policy “disastrous.”
Trump said repealing the regulations “has nothing to do with public health.”
“This was all a scam, a giant scam,” Trump said on Thursday. “This was a rip off of the country by Obama and Biden.”
In addition, the Trump administration will finalize a repeal of rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, since they stem from the finding. Under former President Joe Biden, the EPA sought to tighten those standards to prod the auto industry to make more fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles — an effort the industry has since backtracked on.
By getting rid of the endangerment finding, the administration can more easily overturn other rules that reduce climate pollution emitted from power plants and oil and gas operations, although those will take separate regulatory processes to overturn.
The full text of EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding wasn’t made available before the Trump administration announced it, but the justification for the repeal laid out in an EPA press release relies far more on legal arguments than an outright rejection of climate science.
The agency is arguing that the Obama and Biden administrations exceeded their legal authority when they used the Clean Air Act to regulate climate pollution. This is in contrast to last summer, when the agency first proposed the repeal. The EPA proposal was then based in part on a hastily produced report authored by five climate contrarians that questioned the severity of climate impacts like wildfires, extreme heat and stronger storms.
Instead of doubling down on that Thursday, the Trump EPA in a press release concluded the Clean Air Act “does not provide statutory authority for EPA” to put forward vehicle emissions standards “including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations.”
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