Marathon Petroleum Company’s Salt Lake City Refinery in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and his top environmental policy officer finalized a move Thursday to undo an Environmental Protection Agency regulation that laid the foundation for federal rules governing emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.
At a White House event, Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said they were officially rolling back the “endangerment finding” that labeled greenhouse gases a threat to public health and provided a framework for the EPA to regulate emissions.
The 2009 finding, established under President Barack Obama, called climate change a danger to human health and therefore gave the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from cars and trucks.
Such regulations created a challenge for automakers and other industries, which dragged down the entire economy, according to Trump, administration officials and allies in Congress.
Democrats and their allies in environmental and climate activism, though, consider the measure a crucial tool to address climate change and protect human health.
Undoing the finding will remove the economy-wide uncertainty, Trump argued.
“That is why, effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emission standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond,” he said Thursday.
Affordability argument
In its initial notice last year that it would repeal the endangerment finding, the EPA said it did not have the authority to regulate vehicle emissions.
With household costs, including transportation, expected to be a major theme in the fall’s midterm campaigns to determine control of Congress, members of both parties have framed it as an economic issue.
“This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at Tuesday’s press briefing.
Some Democrats and climate activists argue the rollback will hurt the country’s nascent renewable energy sector, driving up the cost of home heating, electricity and other common expenses.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., issued a lengthy joint statement slamming the announcement.
“The Trump EPA has fully abandoned its duty to protect the American people from greenhouse gas pollution and climate change. This shameful abdication — an economic, moral, and political failure — will harm Americans’ health, homes, and economic well-being. It ignores scientific fact and common-sense observations to serve big political donors,” the senators said.
“This sham decision initially relied on a now thoroughly disgraced and abandoned ‘report’ by known climate deniers. Zeldin stuck to this charade anyway, undaunted by half a century of actual evidence, showing the fix was in from the beginning,” they continued.
Money and fossil fuels
The move outraged Democrats and climate activists when Zeldin first proposed it last summer. Climate activists say undoing the finding undercuts the federal government’s ability to address an issue critical to the United States and the entire world.
In a Tuesday floor speech, Schumer blasted the rollback as a giveaway to fossil fuel companies, leaders of which contributed to Trump’s 2024 campaign.
“Remember: In the spring of 2024, Donald Trump invited top oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and told them, if you raise me a billion dollars to get me elected, I will cut regulations so you can make more money,” Schumer said. “That devil’s bargain is now coming true. I never thought it would be this way in America, in this bald disgusting way that so hurts people’s health, but there it is.”
Democratic attorneys general and environmental groups are likely to sue over the rollback.
At least one lawsuit, from the Environmental Defense Fund, was promised Thursday afternoon.
“EDF will challenge this decision in court, where evidence matters, and keep working with everyone who wants to build a better, safer and more prosperous future,” Fred Krupp, EDF president, said in a statement Thursday.
Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, said last year he would “consider all options if EPA continues down this cynical path.”
Ashley Murray contributed to this report.
