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The Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly calling on the Trump administration to strike down a landmark climate finding that cleared the way for regulating planet-warming and polluting greenhouse gas emissions.
A report from The Washington Post cited three people briefed on the matter, who said former Trump staff members had been advising the administration on repealing the finding.
“President Trump’s day one Executive Order, ‘Unleashing American Energy,’ gave the EPA Administrator a 30-day deadline to submit joint recommendations to the Director of [Office of Emergency Management], in collaboration with the heads of any other relevant agencies, on the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 Endangerment Finding,” a spokesperson for the agency told The Independent in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
“EPA is in compliance with this aspect of the President’s Executive Order,” they said. The order had asked the EPA to review the “legality and continuing applicability” of the finding, giving them 30 days to do so.
The endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act was signed by then-administrator Lisa Jackson, who was nominated by Barack Obama ahead of his first term in 2009.
“The administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations,” the agency said.
Repealing the finding would undercut the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, according to Ben Cahill, the director for Energy Markets and Policy at the Center for Energy and Environmental Systems Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin.
“All kinds of implications for various regulations since 2009. This is ‘kill the administrative state’ territory,” he wrote on social media earlier this year.
Environmental Defense Fund General Counsel Vickie Patton said Wednesday that any action would “trample science, be contrary to law, and worsen the harms that are already being felt by Americans in communities across the country.”
“Such an effort would be reckless, unlawful, and ignore EPA’s fundamental responsibility to protect Americans from destructive climate pollution. We will vigorously oppose it,” she said.
“If the Administration were to reverse the endangerment finding, greenhouse gases would no longer need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Presumably, EPA would then simply move to revoke all of Biden’s major climate rules regulating cars, trucks, power plants, and oil and gas operations,” wrote UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson.
Carlson predicted that even if the EPA overturns the finding, it will “be sued on the substance.”
“And it should lose in court. The science linking greenhouse gases emitted from all of the sources EPA is currently regulating is overwhelming,” she said.
The endangerment finding has faced challenges before. Leadership at the EPA during Trump’s first term did not rescind the endangerment finding, despite petitions, the National Resources Defense Council noted.
But, the president’s second terms comes with a renewed fervor to aid the fossil fuel industry: the culprits of climate change. Trump has pledged multiple times to “drill, baby, drill,” even as carbon dioxide and other gases have continued to turn up Earth’s thermostat. Last year was the hottest year on record.
While Administrator Lee Zeldin recognized the importance of tackling climate change in his confirmation hearing, he’s pulled a complete 180-degree turn since.
Despite the fact that the EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment, the agency and the White House have already taken several steps toward derailing federal climate efforts, deleting information from agency websites, canceling grants and telling employees who work on climate that they could be terminated. This week, Democrats wrote to the EPA to express concern over its “politicization.”
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who denies the established science of climate change, celebrated the news.
“A reversal would be the factual basis for ending federal government participation in the climate hoax and Green New Scam,” he wrote on X.
It remains unclear how much conjecture is actually prophecy at this point, with legal hurdles in the way of revoking greenhouse gas regulation. A recent report found that two-thirds of Americans still believe that climate change is impacting the Earth.
“It’s a finding about greenhouse gasses based on science. It will be hard to convince a court — even a court with Republican-appointed judges — that the science somehow isn’t there to support this finding,” Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, told The New York Times last month.
Source: independent.co.uk
