One of the architects of a landmark 16-year-old finding on pollution’s impact on health that the Trump administration now wants to eliminate says that doing so would ignore “clear cut” science that has only become clearer today because of extreme weather.
The Trump administration plans would sweep away the US government’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gases in order to address the climate crisis.
A proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would rescind the so-called “endangerment finding”, the federal government’s 2009 conclusion that carbon dioxide, along with five other greenhouse gases, harm the health of Americans.
The finding has underpinned the US government’s legal authority to deal with the climate crisis under the Clean Air Act and its removal would effectively dismantle limits on the pollution coming from cars, trucks and power plants that is dangerously heating the world. Several sources confirmed the draft plan, which was first reported on by the New York Times.
A former EPA official who oversaw the crafting of the endangerment finding said there was little doubt among government scientists about the harm caused by greenhouse gases, with their findings borne out by escalating temperatures and disasters since 2009. “The science and the impacts were clear then and are only more clear today,” said Jason Burnett, who was associate deputy administrator of the EPA during George W Bush’s administration.
“The science is clear cut, the impacts are clear cut and the law is clear cut. The challenge should be how we reduce emissions rather than debate whether there’s a problem.”
Donald Trump, who as president has moved to squash pollution rules, stymie clean energy and boost fossil fuel production, had ordered a review of the endangerment finding. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator, said in March of the review that the administration “will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”
The endangerment finding followed a key 2007 supreme court ruling that greenhouse gases are pollutants that the EPA is obligated to regulate. A subsequent 210-page assessment by the EPA documented the growing evidence of harm caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases through heatwaves, stronger storms, strained water resources and impacts upon agricultural yields.
Burnett said: “When I was working on this 17 years ago, it was a question of future impacts but today we are seeing and feeling those impacts as devastating events. People are having their lives upturned by floods in Texas or fires in California or hurricanes in Florida and all of these things are made worse by climate change. What is most tragic to me is that this administration won’t have any answer for those people.”
An avalanche of scientific research since 2009 has underscored the multitude of harm caused by the climate crisis, with researchers repeatedly reaffirming the strengthening case of the endangerment finding during this period.
Since the EPA’s finding, eight of the 10 hottest years in recorded US history have occurred, along with more frequent extreme weather events that have helped spur 255 disasters that have each cost $1bn or more in damages.
The US government’s latest climate assessment in 2023, a report since yanked offline by the Trump administration, states that the “effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States”.
It adds that “without rapid and deep reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, the risks of accelerating sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather and other harmful climate impacts will continue to grow”.
A repeal of the finding, however, would not only eliminate current limits to the pollution worsening this situation but also hamstring any future administration that sought to resurrect the US’s effort to curb global heating. “For the EPA to repeal the 2009 finding borders on criminal negligence,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University.
“The science was clear in 2009 and has become much stronger and clearer since,” he added. “Climate disruption is a large and growing problem, it is caused primarily from our use of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions of carbon dioxide and methane; and it is a deadly problem.”
The EPA plan isn’t expected to directly deny the overwhelming evidence of damage caused by planet-heating emissions, but rather claim that the agency doesn’t have the legal authority under the Clean Air Act to make such a wide determination upon a group of different pollutants.
The plan will also set in motion the reversal of regulations placed upon cars by Joe Biden’s administration that were intended to slash emissions from transportation, the largest sectoral source of carbon pollution in the US.
Currently, the rollbacks are listed as being under review by the White House. “The proposal will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the administrator,” an EPA spokesperson said.
The plan, once finalized, will almost certainly be legally challenged by environmental groups that will point to the 2007 supreme court ruling as compelling the endangerment finding.
“My view is the administration is very unlikely able to win this in litigation given they are operating on theories that are inconsistent with the way the EPA has dealt with matters for the past 50 years,” said Richard Revesz, an expert in environmental policy at the New York University School of Law. “The legal grounds are very flimsy. But this will all take a lot of time and bring a lot of uncertainty to the landscape.”
Should the finding be repealed, though, Revesz said the impact would be “devastating” and compound other actions by the administration to eviscerate the EPA of scientists and reverse the agency’s oversight of pollution.
“They are attacking all of the elements necessary to protect the health and safety of the American people, their actions will literally lead to tens of thousands of premature deaths every year,” he said. “This is orders of magnitude more extreme than Donald Trump’s first term.”
Even if the scrapping of the endangerment rule is ultimately overturned by the courts, environmental groups warned that the reversal would have lingering impacts.
“The American people know that climate change is a threat to public health and welfare – not just because the science has been clear for decades, but because they can see it with their own eyes,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, who called the EPA plan “cruel and absurd”.
“This move won’t hold up in court, but in the months or years it takes to work through the legal process, corporate polluters will be able to inflict irreversible damage that the rest of us will be paying for years to come,” she added.
