On Thursday, o The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to withdraw endangerment findings that underpin the United States’ ability to regulate greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The rollback, the result of more than 15 years of work by right-wing special interest groups, represents the most aggressive move yet against U.S. climate regulation and will kick off a long fight that will almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court.
The move could also create significant legal and regulatory uncertainty for a wide range of industries, from oil companies fighting state and local climate lawsuits to auto companies trying to schedule production of fresh models amid ongoing legal battles.
“I don’t see any plan, no strategy, no end,” says Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the University of Vermont. “I don’t see anything from this administration, just screw it up as bad as you can. You can print it.”
The Neat Air Act requires EPA to regulate all types of air pollutants that may pose a threat to public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is a 2009 ruling that creates the scientific and legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Neat Air Act. This discovery forms the basis of all climate regulations issued by the agency since then, from restrictions on power plants to emissions standards for cars.
The original determination was imposed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPAin a case brought by the state against the Bush administration challenging its failure to take action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. The Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Neat Air Act.
Even before the findings regarding the threat were officially announced, it was already a political game of right-wing interests. Following the Bush-era Supreme Court decision, the EPA sent the White House an email linking six greenhouse gases to climate change and detailing a number of disparate impacts on public health and the environment. However, the White House refused to open the email to confirm the scientific facts and discovery, kicking the can down the road for almost two years until the email was released in 2009 under Obama. Right-wing groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the Project 2025 plan, were vocal critics judgment and EPA actions on greenhouse gases for nearly two decades. (As The Novel York Times reported on Monday, Heritage Foundation financed the campaign in 2022 to lend a hand create the regulatory documents that enabled the repeal of the endangerment finding).
The threat assertion has proven extremely hard for these groups to attack. Both of Trump’s first administrators on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to challenge the findings while in office, despite pressure from ideologues inside and outside that administration.
This hesitation was partly due to companies supporting the original EPA ruling. “The industry has generally supported stability in this space and EPA retaining regulatory authority,” says Meghan Greenfield, a former senior adviser to the EPA. “The threat finding serves this really important purpose of ensuring a level playing field and recognizing the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
AND draft phaseout published this summer included a slew of arguments aimed at disputing that finding, including the claim that because greenhouse gas emissions are global, they should not be regulated under the Neat Air Act.
“This proposal basically threw spaghetti at the wall,” says Rachel Cleetus, senior director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There are all kinds of arguments, all baseless – Clean Air Act arguments, scientific arguments, cost arguments.”