Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has joined dozens of state attorneys general and local leaders challenging the White House’s rollback of vehicle-emission regulations. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in response to last month’s change in guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, marks at least the 22nd time Shapiro has taken on the Trump administration in court.
“The science is clear: pollution is bad for our health, makes severe weather worse, and threatens farmers’ crops — yet the Trump Administration is once again throwing that science out the window,” Shapiro said in a statement. “In Pennsylvania, we trust the science.”
Pennsylvania is one of 38 plaintiffs — including Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Delaware, as well as several cities and counties across the nation — named in the suit. They hope to block the Trump Administration’s repeal of the EPA’s own 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
The finding offered guidance to reduce six climate-warming gases, including carbon dioxide and methane: Until the Trump administration sought to cancel it last month, the finding provided the legal basis for nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.
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Experts warn the repeal could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities.
Explaining its decision last month, Trump’s EPA argued against climate science and the agency’s previous guidance that transportation emissions account for nearly 30% of all greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.
“Even the complete elimination of all [greenhouse gas] emissions from all new and existing vehicles in the U.S. would have only [minimal] impacts that fall well within the standard margin of error for global temperature and sea level measurement,” the Trump administration wrote in its final ruling.
Among other arguments, the administration contends that the EPA didn’t have the authority to make clean air policy changes — and that it’s up to Congress to do so. Both the EPA and its administrator Lee Zeldin are named as defendants in the suit.
A Shapiro spokesperson said that as of Friday afternoon, the White House hadn’t responded to the plaintiffs. But when the administration announced the environmental rollbacks last month, the president called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history, by far.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark 2007 case, ruled that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Since the high court’s decision, in a case known as Massachusetts v. EPA, courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the endangerment finding.
EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said the latest lawsuit was “not about the law or the merits of any argument.” Instead, the plaintiffs “are clearly motivated by politics,” she said.
Reversing the clean air guidance means a repeal to “all [greenhouse gas] emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines manufactured or imported into the United States for model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond,” the final rule says. The EPA’s rule changes are set to go into effect on April 20.
The legal challenge could result in delays to the Trump administration’s policy goals.
Environmental advocates in Pennsylvania celebrated Shapiro’s decision to join the lawsuit. Green policy group PennFuture said it “strongly supports” the action.
The rules that Trump decided to toss out are “scientifically supported and highly cost-effective regulation of greenhouse gas emissions,” PennFuture said in a statement, calling the repeal “nothing more than a blatant political move based on lies.”
“The only ones benefiting from repealing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are the polluting fossil fuel companies,” the group added.
And a Pittsburgh-area clean air watchdog, Group Against Smog and Pollution, said it continues to urge local and state lawmakers to “treat climate change as the very real threat to public health that it is… [P]retending the threat does not exist is simply not an option.”
“Like so many decisions from this regime, the rationale for this move seems to be based on how industry will benefit from this repeal,’” said GASP spokesperson Amanda Gillooly. “The [EPA’s] proposal was absurdly light on any details about the devastating impact it will have on the environment and, more importantly, on human health.
“It’s clear the EPA has lost its way,” she added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
What the end of the ‘endangerment finding’ means for Pennsylvania
