Marathon Petroleum Company’s Salt Lake City Refinery in Salt Lake City on Jan. 3, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
A coalition of public health and environmental groups filed a suit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration’s recent finding that the Environmental Protection Agency could not regulate climate-warming greenhouse gases.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and President Donald Trump announced last week the administration was finalizing a repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, which declared the agency could regulate greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from vehicle emissions, because climate change posed a danger to human health.
The 17 groups who jointly filed the suit Wednesday include the American Public Health Association, Clean Wisconsin, Union of Concerned Scientists, Earthjustice and Natural Resources Defense Council.
‘Required by law to protect us’
Their two-page filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit does not detail any of the groups’ legal arguments against the repeal, but lawyers and officials for the groups said the EPA was legally bound, under the Clean Air Act, to protect people from greenhouse gas emissions.
“They are required by law to protect us from air pollution that endangers public health and welfare,” Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the CEO of the American Public Health Association, said on a video call with reporters. “And that includes greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.”
The law requires challenges to new nationwide agency actions on emissions to be filed in the D.C. Circuit.
In an email from the EPA’s press office, the agency said it had reviewed the endangerment finding, the Clean Air Act and related court decisions, including “robust analysis” of recent Supreme Court decisions. The agency concluded it did not have authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“Unlike our predecessors, the Trump EPA is committed to following the law exactly as it is written and as Congress intended—not as others might wish it to be,” the email said.
“In the absence of such authority, the Endangerment Finding is not valid, and EPA cannot retain the regulations that resulted from it,” the agency continued. “EPA is bound by the laws established by Congress, including under the CAA. Congress never intended to give EPA authority to impose GHG regulations for cars and trucks.”
Emissions are pollutants, opponents say
But the groups said the EPA’s reasoning ignored that the agency has long regulated emissions as part of its mandate to protect clear air. The omission of the term “greenhouse gases” in the Clean Air Act is “a manufactured problem” by opponents of regulation, Hana Vizcarra, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, said.
“The Clean Air Act was intended to cover air pollutants, full stop. Air pollutants include greenhouse gases,” she said. “This argument that Congress needs to do something different to be able to regulate greenhouse gases… it’s just a way to avoid the issue and avoid regulation.”
The matter is “settled law,” the groups said, as federal courts have affirmed and reaffirmed the EPA’s power to regulate emissions.
A 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case established that the Clean Air Act “was unambiguous” in authorizing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants, Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at NRDC, said.
That decision led to the EPA’s so-called endangerment finding two years later, during President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
Attorneys general likely to weigh in
Wednesday’s challenge will likely be consolidated with other challenges, including those from “blue-state attorneys general,” Hankins said.
In the announcement last week, Trump said the endangerment finding, and the tailpipe emissions standards that relied on it, had dragged down the automotive sector and the broader economy nationwide.
The administration has said the move will save Americans more than $1 trillion by reducing regulations.
The repeal’s opponents, though, said Wednesday that projection ignored more than $100 billion in additional costs American drivers would see if fuel efficiency standards are relaxed or the enormous public health costs from worsened air quality and increased climate risks.
