#endangerment finding

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose Tuesday to repeal its landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to the public.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the timing of the proposed repeal during an appearance on the conservative “Ruthless” podcast Tuesday morning. He had previously said last week that he would axe the finding.

“Later today, we’re going to be making a big announcement in Indiana,” he said Tuesday morning.

 “Something that happened back in the Obama administration in 2009 was that they put forward this regulation called the ‘endangerment finding,’” Zeldin said.

“Repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” he added. 

Quite a line up going after trump and his EPA. The states suing the EPA are: Massachusetts, California, New York, Connecticut, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Others joining in the lawsuit are the District of Columbia, Virgin Islands, the Cities of Albuquerque, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus (Ohio), Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco, and the Counties of Denver, Harris (Texas), Martin Luther King, Jr. (Washington), San Francisco and Santa Clara.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The lawsuit was filed in the ​U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It is expected to be consolidated with a case that environmental groups filed in February, making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration’s unraveling of federal climate policy.

The states are arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency acted illegally when it rescinded a 2009 scientific conclusion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, formed the legal basis for the E.P.A. to regulate emissions from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, oil and gas wells, and other sources.

Decades of scientific research has found that emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans and supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

The lawsuit seeks to reinstate the endangerment finding, forcing the Trump administration to retain the government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution even if it doesn’t exercise that power.

The suit also seeks to reverse a related E.P.A. move that repealed limits on greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States, accounting for more than a third of total climate pollution.

“The endangerment finding is critical for us to protect the health and well-being of our families, of our kids,” Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, which is leading the lawsuit along with California, New York and Connecticut, said in an interview. She accused the E.P.A. of “blatant violations of the law” in repealing it.

“The E.P.A. came out with no new science, no new law or legal precedent that would allow them to walk away from the endangerment finding,” said Ms. Campbell, a Democrat like all the officials who joined the litigation.

The Trump administration has already begun to repeal federal rules imposed by the Biden administration on cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and other sources of climate pollution. But getting rid of the endangerment finding was seen as a way to tear out climate regulations at their roots.

More than three dozen Democratic senators have begun an independent inquiry into the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a huge change in how the agency measures the health benefits of reducing air pollution that is widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.

In a regulatory impact analysis, the EPA said it would stop assigning a monetary value to the health benefits associated with regulations on fine particulate matter and ozone. The agency argued that the estimates contain too much uncertainty.

Previously, the EPA placed a dollar figure on the benefits of cleaner air, factoring in outcomes such as fewer premature deaths and reduced illness, including asthma attacks.

The 2009 endangerment finding determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare and should therefore be controlled by the EPA. By revoking it on Thursday, officials eliminated the legal foundation enabling the government to control planet-heating pollution.

The senators criticized the updated policy as “particularly troubling” and said the repeal “destroys that framework and results in a failure to faithfully execute EPA’s statutory mandate to protect human health”, according to a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday.

The effort is being led by the ranking member of the Senate committee on the environment and public works, Sheldon Whitehouse. The lawmakers have asked the EPA to provide documents and details explaining how it reached its decision by 26 February.

Spencer Kimball at CNBC:

The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a landmark scientific finding that serves as the legal foundation for federal regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions, in a devastating blow to efforts to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, established under President Barack Obama in 2009, classified carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases as a threat to public health and welfare. It underpins Clean Air Act emissions standards and rules for cars and light trucks, power plants, and oil and gas industry facilities. “This is about as big as it gets,” President Donald Trump said at the White House with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding.”

Zeldin said all greenhouse gas emissions standards on light, medium and heavy duty vehicles that followed the endangerment finding have been eliminated. “No longer will automakers be pressured to shift their fleets towards electric vehicles,” he said. The endangerment finding emerged from a Supreme Court decision in 2007 that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and the EPA must determine whether they pose a threat to public health. Zeldin’s decision to revoke the finding is the most significant action taken yet in the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle U.S. regulations that address climate change. He described the repeal as the largest de-regulatory action in American history. Obama said in a social media post that the Trump administration’s action makes the U.S. “less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.”

On Thursday, the Trump Regime’s EPA hands a victory to climate change deniers and Big Oil lobbyists by revoking a 2009 endangerment finding by the Obama Administration on the threat of greenhouse gas to public health and welfare.

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The Trump administration's plan to undo a landmark finding that climate pollution threatens public health and welfare poses lots of risks for corporate America.

The Environmental Protection Agency's endangerment finding has served as the legal basis for federal climate regulations under the Clean Air Act since 2009. The finding concludes that the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere endangers people's health and the well-being of communities. Reaching that determination was a prerequisite to set limits for the pollution. Getting rid of that authority would lead to the repeal of "all greenhouse gas standards" at the federal level, according to the EPA, amounting, it says, to "one of the largest deregulatory actions in American history."

Excerpt:

A federal judge on Friday ruled the Energy Department violated the law when Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming.

The Energy Department issued the report, which downplayed the dangers of warming, in late July without having held any public meetings or made records available to the public. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, then cited the report to justify a plan to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark scientific determination that serves as the legal foundation for regulating climate pollution.

But the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 does not allow agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups for the purposes of policymaking. Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.

“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”

Erin Murphy, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, which brought the lawsuit together with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the ruling should undercut the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate climate regulations.

Ms. Murphy said that emails and other internal documents made public under the judge’s orders showed that Energy Department political appointees had coordinated with the E.P.A. and relayed instructions to the climate researchers to produce what she called a “slanted” scientific report.

“It was powerful for the court to issue this order making it clear that this is a legal violation and not how the government should be approaching policy,” she said.

The agency disbanded the Climate Working Group shortly after environmental groups sued, and argued that, having done so, any legal concerns were rendered moot. The court disagreed.

Climate leaders gathered outside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters on Wednesday to condemn the Trump administration’s plans to repeal the legal finding underpinning all federal climate regulations, and promised to fight against the rollback.

“This is corruption, plain and simple. Old-fashioned, dirty political corruption,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, senator for Rhode Island, at the rally. “This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters.”

The rescinding of the 2009 endangerment finding will be finalized by Donald Trump and the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, on Thursday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters this week. The seminal ruling established the legal basis to regulate planet-warming pollution under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration has defended its rollbacks of regulations, arguing they can protect the environment while boosting the economy and lowering energy costs.

The administration is calling it the “largest deregulatory action in American history” and claims it will save Americans $1.3tn, though did not explain how officials arrived at that number. In an emailed statement, an EPA spokesperson said the endangerment finding was used to “justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines”

Experts warn it could incur trillions in climate damages and healthcare costs.

At Wednesday’s gathering, environmental nonprofits including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice and Sierra Club pledged to file litigation over the forthcoming rollback.

Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts also promised that he and Whitehouse would highlight the issue in the Senate, while the New York member Paul Tonko said he would do the same on the floor of the House.

The move comes a year and a half after Trump on the campaign trail reportedly requested $1bn from oil bosses, promising he would scrap environmental rules if elected.

“[Zeldin] is saying to the fossil fuel industry, you now are gonna get what you paid for,” said Markey at the gathering. “This is cash and carry: you give us the cash, and then we carry away all of the environmental protections.”

The plan to kill the endangerment finding was “terrifying”, said Talia Brandt, a 10-year-old Maryland resident and member of environmental health organization Moms Clean Air Force, who appeared at the rally with her mother, Liz.

“We shouldn’t have to be here fighting for our future,” she said.

The endangerment finding was based on a large body of peer-reviewed research and has repeatedly defended and upheld in federal courts. Since it was codified, the evidence showing greenhouse gas emissions endanger society has only gotten stronger, said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of EPA’s office of air and radiation at EPA.

“Science did not change when Donald Trump was inaugurated,” said Goffman, who helped write and implement the Clean Air Act and worked directly on the endangerment finding. “What did change was the arrival of the new EPA management, determined to destroy the agency’s public health and environmental mission.”

The forthcoming killing of the endangerment finding comes as part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to deregulate energy and boost fossil fuels. On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order directing the defense department to procure more power from coal, the most polluting and planet-warming fossil fuel.

On the same day, the president was awarded the inaugural “Undisputed Champion of Coal” title from the Washington Coal Club – a DC-based pro-coal industry organization – for his efforts to roll back federal climate regulations.

The coal industry poured $3.5m into efforts to elect Trump in 2024. Reports show the president’s efforts to keep ageing coal plants open could push up already soaring energy bills nationwide.

In an interview with the Guardian, Markey said the Trump administration’s attack on environmental rules – and the opposition to that attack – was “making climate change an issue again” across America.

While the “billionaire class” benefits from the rollback of the endangerment finding, vulnerable people will be harmed the most, Manuel Salgado, federal research manager at environmental justice non-profit We Act for Environmental Justice, said at the rally.

Well, this sucks. If the EPA follows through, it will publish proposed rules that will wipe out the "endangerment finding," which provided the legal basis for the EPA to control greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. So we all get to get sick or if we live on the coasts watch our houses get gobbled up by the tides and storms or witness global crop failures and many more wildfires belching out jillions of tons of carbon and other crap into the air, because trump doesn't believe in science in favor of his own fantasies and lies, and of course the need for the fossil fuel execs to get even richer.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan.

The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives.

That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet.

The E.P.A. proposal, which is expected to be made public within days, also calls for rescinding limits on tailpipe emissions that were designed to encourage automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles. Those regulations, which were based on the endangerment finding, were a fundamental part of the Biden administration’s efforts to move the country away from gasoline-powered vehicles. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

The E.P.A. intends to argue that imposing climate regulations on automakers poses the real harm to human health because it would lead to higher prices and reduced consumer choice, according to the two people familiar with the administration’s plan. They asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to discuss the draft proposal.