Marianne Lavelle
By revoking its 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency will demolish the legal underpinning of its authority to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting U.S. use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office.
To help readers sort through the meaning of the highly technical legal maneuver by the Trump administration, and look to what comes next, Inside Climate News tackled some of the key questions raised by the reversal of the endangerment finding:
Does this mean that scientists now think climate change is not a problem?
A panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) put it bluntly: “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused [greenhouse gases] is beyond scientific dispute,” the scientists said in a report submitted to the EPA as it launched its repeal process. They said that the endangerment finding that the Obama administration adopted in 2009 is now supported by longer observational records and multiple new lines of evidence.
In its original proposal, the Trump EPA relied on recent Supreme Court decisions it said restrict its authority to act on climate under current law, and close observers expect that will be the administration’s strategy.
“We expect EPA to revoke the endangerment finding for legal reasons, not scientific ones,” said Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the Bracewell law firm who served as head of EPA’s air office during President George W. Bush’s administration.
If this is about law and not science, how has the law changed since 2009?
The second Trump administration had the confidence to take on the endangerment finding largely because of how the president reshaped the Supreme Court in his first term, legal experts say. In two 6-3 decisions from a conservative majority bolstered by Trump’s three appointees, the justices created new doctrine that limited the power of federal regulatory agencies like the EPA.
The Supreme Court struck down Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, in 2022. And in that case, West Virginia v. EPA, the court established its so-called “major questions doctrine,” saying regulation of greenhouse gases was an issue of such great economic and political significance that the EPA could not regulate them without explicit direction from Congress. Then, in a 2024 case over fishing regulations, the Supreme Court overturned the principle that had guided regulatory law for 40 years, saying that federal agencies were due no deference in interpreting ambiguities in the law. The court said judges, not agencies, should decide the meaning of the law, even though in the environmental realm that typically involves application of science and knowledge of the best available technologies for reining in pollution.
So is this “final” decision really final?
Not in the least. The EPA’s regulatory determinations are challenged in court more than those of any other federal agency, according to tracking by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, and this high-stakes decision will not be an exception.
Climate action advocates see the endangerment finding as a key line they must defend in what they see as the extraordinary all-out assault on environmental protection in the second Trump term. “Put simply, this is a gift-wrapped package for the fossil fuel industry,” said Manish Bapna, CEO of NRDC. “It is unscientific, it is bad economics, and it is illegal. So we’re gonna fight it.”
The first stop will be the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has exclusive jurisdiction over appeals of nationally applicable regulations. Seven of the 11 judges on that court were appointed by Presidents Obama or Biden.
How hard would it be for a future administration to restore the finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to human health and the environment?
It depends on the courts. If Massachusetts v. EPA is still standing at the end of the battle, the EPA will still have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. But if the Supreme Court were to rule the Clean Air Act gives the EPA no authority over greenhouse gas emissions—“Then there would be the problem of a lack of authority, unless Congress wrote a new law,” said Doniger of NRDC.
No matter the outcome of the coming litigation over the endangerment finding repeal, the fossil fuel industry has won time. The Trump administration has ensured that the nation that has contributed the most to the atmosphere’s overload of climate pollution, the United States, will be entangled in litigation during years that scientists have said are crucial for driving down the pollution that is increasing risks and costs for communities as it alters the planet.
From insideclimatenews.org