Trump’s EPA kills legal basis for federal climate policy

What happened

The Environmental Protection Agency Thursday revoked its 2009 “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment. The move ends the federal government’s legal authority to regulate those planet-warming pollutants. President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin immediately moved to eliminate all federal tailpipe emissions standards for cars and trucks. The repeal will also allow the EPA to complete its gutting of climate regulations on power plants, oil and gas wells and other stationary sources of pollution.

Who said what

Trump called Thursday’s repeal the “single largest deregulatory action in American history,” claiming it would end the “giant scam” of climate regulations started by President Barack Obama. Obama said on social media that the reversal would make Americans “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”

Reversing the endangerment finding is a “knockout punch in the yearslong fight by a small group of conservative activists as well as oil, gas and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy,” The New York Times said. The repeal “has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change” because if upheld in court, “it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases.”

Instead of “challenging established climate science,” which the administration tried to do last year before losing in court, the EPA is pushing a legal argument “that the Clean Air Act was never intended to allow for regulation of greenhouse gases because climate change is a global phenomenon,” Politico said. The George W. Bush administration lost a similar fight before the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that the EPA had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. That ruling led to the endangerment finding.

What next?

Environmental groups and Democratic-led states will “mount a fierce legal challenge to the repeal,” Politico said. Trump and his allies are “banking that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court” he helped install will ultimately reverse its 2007 decision.