The Trump administration will propose the repeal of a landmark 2009 determination that climate change poses a danger to the public, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday.
“EPA has sent to the Office of Management and Budget a proposed rule to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding from the Obama EPA,” Zeldin told Newsmax.
“Through the endangerment finding, there has been into the trillions worth of regulations, including tailpipe emissions and including electric vehicle mandates,” he added.
In 2009, then-President Obama’s administration made a formal determination that greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane posed a threat to public health. It found emissions from vehicles contributed to the problem.
The finding provided a legal basis for EPA regulations on these planet-heating gases, including for its rules requiring automakers’ to cut emissions from their vehicle fleets.
While these rules did not explicitly mandate a pivot to electric vehicles, standards issued by the Biden administration were expected to push the vehicle market toward more electric cars in the years ahead.
The EPA’s plans to propose a rule to repeal the finding were first reported by The New York Times.
The Trump administration’s move comes despite a consensus from the scientific community that human activity, especially its use of fossil fuels, is heating up the planet. This heating in turn exacerbates extreme weather.
During President Trump’s first term, his administration weakened limits on planet-warming emissions, including from vehicles, but it did not repeal the endangerment finding.
The proposal to repeal it signals an escalation that could prevent the agency from having climate regulations on the books at all.
Zealan Hoover, who served as a senior EPA advisor during the Biden administration said it is “insane” to say that climate change doesn’t impact U.S. health and welfare.
“We are right back to full-throated climate denialism of the early 2000s,” Hoover said.
“Climate change impacts public health because it changes the Earth’s climate patterns in ways that are beyond both what the human body and our built systems, evolved to have been designed to adapt [to], so that looks like extreme heat, which can cause heat stress and death…. it leads to sea level rise, which you know is makes for more damaging storm surges and even flooding on, non-storm days,” he added.
President Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change, sought to downplay its impacts, repeal regulations meant to combat the problem and defund efforts to research and mitigate it.
The EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding came after a 2007 Supreme Court case which said that the agency can regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act and that the agency should decide whether they imperil public health.
The Trump administration had previously signaled that it could repeal the finding.
During his confirmation hearing, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declined to say whether he believed the EPA had a responsibility to regulate climate change.
In March, the agency said it would reconsider the finding without saying what the outcome of that reconsideration would be.
The move also echoes a similar proposal from the agency to determine that powerplants’ planet-warming emissions “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated.
The EPA appears to be preparing a proposal rather than a final decision, meaning the formal revocation of the endangerment finding could be months or even years away.
Updated at 6:36 p.m. EDT
