EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the agency would move to rescind an Obama-era declaration called the “endangerment finding,” which said that greenhouse gases are warming the planet and threatening public health.
Pennsylvania is one of the top emitters of industrial greenhouse gases in the country. The endangerment finding provided the scientific basis for the government to limit emissions from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources.
“How big is the endangerment finding?” Zeldin asked on a conservative podcast called Ruthless. “Well, repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America. So it’s kind of a big deal.”
Zeldin said the endangerment finding is central to what he called “the left’s environmental agenda.”
“This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion,” he said.
It’s not religion, according to environmental groups. It’s science.
“The science was very clear when the finding was released in 2009, and since then, there’s been so much more evidence,” said Diane Pataki, chief scientist at the National Wildlife Federation. She said there’s no question that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change.
“It’s now just clear to the naked eye, everyone can see the impacts on human health and feel the impacts on human health.”
The Allegheny Front’s Julie Grant spoke with UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson, who is also the faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment.
LISTEN to their conversation
Julie Grant: What is the endangerment finding, and how did it come to be?
Ann Carlson: So a group of environmental organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency many years ago to get them to determine under a federal statute called the Clean Air Act whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare when they’re emitted from cars and trucks. That case [Massachusetts v. EPA] went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.
The United States Supreme Court determined two things. First, that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gases. They’re included in the definition of air pollutants. And second, that the administrator actually has to determine whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
Now the Trump Administration is saying, ‘Well, we don’t need to regulate altogether because it turns out greenhouse gases don’t really harm us.’
That determination was made, it was actually made by the George W. Bush Environmental Protection Agency, but [the endangerment finding was] not issued until President Obama came into office in 2009. It was based on an extensive evaluation of the science and of the contributions that American sources contribute to overall climate change.
And then EPA issued a bunch of regulations, and that has continued to the present day. Although the Trump administration came in the first round and rescinded those regulations, and issued weaker versions. And then the Biden administration came in and issued stronger regulations. Now the Trump Administration is saying, “Well, we don’t need to regulate altogether because it turns out greenhouse gases don’t really harm us.”
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Julie Grant: So what happens to the rules that have been promulgated over time because of the endangerment finding? Are they using this to kind of throw those out wholesale?
Ann Carlson: That’s exactly right. So basically what they’re saying is if greenhouse gasses don’t endanger public health and welfare, then all the rules that the Biden administration issued, there’s rules for trucks, there’s two separate rules for cars, there’s a rule for rules for power plants, there’s rule rules for oil and gas facilities that leak methane. All of those just essentially would disappear because there’s no legal basis anymore for issuing those rules.
Julie Grant: And what can we tell about what EPA is saying is the legal basis for getting rid of this rule that underpins all these other rules?
Ann Carlson: In my view, there is no legal basis for that kind of ruling, but here’s what the administration is trying to argue –they’re saying a number of things: One is, it turns out climate change really isn’t that damaging, which is ironic given that we just lost 135 or more people in some of the worst floods in Texas history, clearly made worse because of climate change. We lost 30 people in my own hometown of Los Angeles in two separate fires in January. The estimates are that those are going to cost about $164 billion in property damage. Every day on the ground, we’re seeing evidence of climate change. And yet one argument is: turns out climate change isn’t that expensive. That’s one of their arguments.
This argument is just untenable from a legal perspective and from a moral perspective.
Another argument is that the regulations are actually more expensive than the costs that climate change would cause. That is undermined by countless studies that show as much as six times the benefits from mitigating climate change than the cost of what those regulations cost.
And then finally, they’re saying that, “Well, it turns out that the emissions from things like cars and trucks in the United States are so small that they don’t really affect global climate change.” Here’s the problem with that argument: Imagine that every country in the world, including China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Europe, Japan, all reasoned that way. We all said, “Well, our contributions don’t really matter.” Well, of course, collectively, all of our contributions are what’s causing climate change and making it worse.
So we need to stop emitting across the globe by really 2050 is the goal, but we need get on a trajectory to do so very quickly now. And this argument is just untenable from a legal perspective and from a moral perspective.
Julie Grant: So now that Administrator Zeldin has announced this, what’s the process that they go through to rescind the findings?
Ann Carlson: It’s a comment period, and then the agency actually has to consider the comments and then go through an obscure agency called OIRA, which is an executive branch agency that evaluates all significant proposals and then issues a final rule. And that typically takes it, probably another year.
Julie Grant: And if EPA does wind up repealing the findings, what happens to the regulations that are based on it?
Ann Carlson: I suspect that they will simply say all of those regulations are moot or invalid once the endangerment finding goes away. So that makes it actually a sort of quicker process to get rid of all those rulemakings. And the big thing that it would allow them to do is not replace the rules. They would not need to do that if they successfully go through this process and actually revoke the endangerment finding.
I suspect that they will simply say all of those [climate] regulations are moot or invalid once the endangerment finding goes away.
Julie Grant: For those who oppose this, what kind of recourse do they have?
Ann Carlson: So, there will be a big legal fight, and we will see undoubtedly legal challenges that will very likely end up in the United States Supreme Court. It may be that the aim here of the Trump administration is to try to get the much more conservative Supreme Court to overturn Massachusetts versus EPA.
Julie Grant: That’s the initial case where the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gases. And what happens if that’s overturned?
Ann Carlson: Then basically I think the argument would be the Clean Air Act doesn’t actually cover greenhouse gases and the administrator doesn’t have to make an endangerment finding. Or alternatively, the administrator was absolutely correct and we’re going to defer to his science and his economics, and he’s right that he doesn’t need to regulate greenhouse gases.
Julie Grant: And if all this does come to pass, what do you think we might see in terms of efforts to regulate pollution that contributes to climate change?
Ann Carlson: If the federal government is saying the Clean Air Act really isn’t useful for regulating greenhouse gases from vehicles, then it might be the case that states can come in and regulate. Right now, California is the leader in regulating, and Congress has told California through a bill that it passed a couple of [months] ago that it cannot regulate. It can’t issue some of the policies that it was about to issue to regulate pollutants from cars and trucks. Maybe they can if the endangerment finding goes away.
Since Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s largest contributors of carbon dioxide emissions, The Allegheny Front reached out to Governor Shapiro’s office to find out what the state would do if the EPA stops regulating industries for climate emissions. There’s been no response so far. The environmental non-profit PennFuture said it would advocate for new state policy and additional DEP funding to fill in the gap, although they are still looking into specifics.
Ann Carlson is an environmental law professor at UCLA and faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment.
