EPA to repeal finding that greenhouse gases warm planet and threaten health

Known as a hazard finding, the EPA’s 2009 decision says greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are warming the Earth and that warming threatens public health and welfare. It therefore functions, under the Clean Air Act, as the linchpin of the rules that set emissions standards for cars and trucks and require fossil fuel companies to report their emissions, among other things.

The move is expected to upend most U.S. policies aimed at reducing climate pollution — if the repeal can withstand legal challenges from environmental groups, who had already prepared to sue.

The text of the rule repealing the decision has not yet been published, so many details remain unknown. However, the EPA released a draft version in August, which also proposed removing all greenhouse gas emissions standards for motor vehicles. Leavitt said the EPA’s planned deregulation would reduce costs for cars, SUVs and trucks — an indication that the final plan could also include reducing vehicle emissions.

Other climate regulations could soon collapse as well: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proposed a rule in June to repeal carbon dioxide standards for power plants and promised that the EPA would reconsider other policies that rely on endangerment findings, including regulations on methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

In a briefing with reporters last month, before the EPA’s decision, Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the expected repeal “the largest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to combat the climate crisis.”

“More and more people are suffering from man-made disasters, from the heartbreaking floods in Texas and North Carolina, to the horrific fire around Los Angeles, to the record heat waves that now hit every summer. To eliminate the threat assessment is to deny these events and the existence of climate change more broadly,” Bapna said.

Conservative think tank The Heartland Institute, meanwhile, welcomed the coming change.

“The Obama administration’s determination that CO2 endangers human health and well-being was scientifically flawed and a blatant political pandering,” said James Taylor, president of the organization.

The endangerment finding was implemented during President Barack Obama’s first term. Today, however, the EPA says the decision “unreasonably analyzed the scientific record” and that its scientific basis was too pessimistic and has not been upheld.

In its draft rule, the EPA said the threat conclusions overestimated the risk of heat waves, projected greater potential warming than has occurred, and downplayed the benefits of increased carbon pollution, such as increased plant growth. Prominent scientific groups have disputed these arguments.

The agency also said that court decisions issued since 2009, such as West Virginia v. EPA, have already reduced its power to regulate greenhouse gases. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA alone did not have broad authority to shift energy production from coal plants to cleaner sources.

The agency pinned many arguments in its preliminary rule on a controversial report commissioned by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. A judge ruled last month that Wright and the Energy Department violated transparency laws in how they formed and managed the task force that created the report.

It is unclear whether the final rule will rely on the same arguments or whether it will modify its rationales in response to public comments.

In their opposition to the EPA’s proposed rule, scientific groups took particular aim at the DOE report, which describes increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as having a “greening” benefit for the planet. The report also states that there is no clear trend in the frequency of extreme weather events and that it is difficult to attribute them to climate change due to “natural climate variability, data limitations and inherent model deficiencies.”

The American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit scientific society, said the report presented “inaccurate and cherry-picked” information.

“The climate is changing more rapidly than ever, driven by human activities, and the resulting impacts on people and the world we depend on are increasingly dire,” the union said in a statement, noting that greenhouse gases were higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

“Climate change directly causes or exacerbates increases in global average temperature and heat waves, sea level rise and storm surges, and ocean acidification, and causes greater frequency, intensity, or both, of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and droughts. »

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued their own report on the hazard finding, concluding that it was accurate and had stood the test of time.

Additionally, a group of 85 climate scientists submitted a point-by-point rebuttal of the DOE report in public comments, writing that it “presents pervasive problems with misrepresentations” and “does not meet standards of quality, usefulness, objectivity, and integrity appropriate to support policy development.”

Last year was the third warmest in modern history, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service. The last 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, according to Copernicus data.

Under President Donald Trump, the EPA has moved to aggressively roll back environmental regulations. Zeldin promised in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year that he would drive “a dagger into the heart of the religion of climate change.”

Overturning the endangerment finding, however, will result in a major legal battle.

The Natural Resources Defense Council vowed to fight the EPA “every step of the way.” One of its lawyers, David Doniger, said it would be “impossible” for the agency to defend its rule change in court because there is a “Denali-sized” mountain of evidence showing that greenhouse gas pollution fuels climate change and intensifies damages such as wildfires, floods and heat waves.