WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

Undoing a Pillar of Climate Policy

The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.

Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.

A Break With Scientific Consensus

It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change, and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.

And it is a knockout punch in the yearslong fight by a small group of conservative activists as well as oil, gas and coal interests to stop the country from transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy.

“This is about as big as it gets,” Trump said at the White House as a smiling Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, stood by. “We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding,’ a disastrous Obama-era policy,” he said.

Trump called it a “radical rule” that became “the basis for the Green New Scam,” a label the president gives to any effort to curb emissions or develop renewable energy.

Zeldin called it “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The administration claimed it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion, although it has declined to explain how it arrived at that estimate.

At issue is what’s known as the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare.

For nearly 17 years, the EPA had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels.

By repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to add up to 18 billion metric tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year.

Legal Battles and Global Consequences

The added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055, the group said.

Democratic governors and environmental leaders immediately said they would challenge the administration’s actions in a high-profile legal battle that is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

“If this reckless decision survives legal challenges, it will lead to more deadly wildfires, more extreme heat deaths, more climate-driven floods and droughts, and greater threats to communities nationwide,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said in a statement. He said the state “will sue to challenge this illegal action” and continue to regulate greenhouse gases.

“We will see them in court, and we will win,” added Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The science and the law are crystal clear, and EPA is issuing a rushed, sloppy and unscientific determination that has no legal basis.”

In revoking the endangerment finding, the Trump administration made the legal argument that the Clean Air Act only allows the government to limit pollution that causes direct harm to Americans, and only in cases where the damage is “near the source” of the pollution.

Greenhouse gases, however, collect in the atmosphere, where they form a kind of blanket around the Earth, trapping heat from the sun. That is altering the Earth’s climate and intensifying heat waves, drought, hurricanes and floods while also melting glaciers, causing sea levels to rise.

The planet has warmed on average by about 1.4 degrees Celsius, or 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Age, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The action announced Thursday eliminates limits on greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States. The Biden administration had sought to tighten limits on tailpipe emissions to encourage automakers to sell more nonpolluting electric vehicles. (Restrictions on other pollutants from automobiles, such as nitrogen oxides and benzene, are still in place.)

Getting rid of the endangerment finding clears the way for the EPA to repeal limits on greenhouse gases from stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants and oil and gas wells, a process that it has begun.

The United States is currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter after China but is the nation that has pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. That distinction matters because past emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases significantly contribute to current warming.

Numerous rigorous scientific findings since 2009 have showed that greenhouse gases and global warming are harming public health and even directly causing deaths.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly all nations agreed to try to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That goal has been seen as crucial to avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

Scientists now expect the Earth to warm by an average of around 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century. Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, making it the only nation among nearly 200 to do so. He also pulled the country out of the underlying United Nations climate treaty and a Nobel Prize-winning group made up of the world’s leading climate scientists.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said the EPA had abandoned its responsibility to protect public health and the environment.

“This shameful abdication — an economic, moral, and political failure — will harm Americans’ health, homes, and economic well-being,” they said in a statement. “It ignores scientific fact and common-sense observations, to serve big political donors.”

Despite decades of established science, Trump has said projections of the Earth’s warming were done by “stupid people.” He has imposed policies to make it cheaper and easier to keep burning coal, gas and oil while throttling efforts to build cleaner energy sources such as solar and wind.

Reversing the endangerment finding has been seen as the holy grail for those who deny the science of climate change. That’s because if the repeal is upheld in court, it could also prevent future administrations from restoring regulations to curb greenhouse gases.

Zeldin and other administration officials said the endangerment finding had been a drag on the economy. They argued that requiring the EPA to tackle climate change harmed consumer choice by limiting the types of automobiles available to purchase.

Some business groups supported the administration’s actions, but others were silent or muted in their response. That’s because trade groups that once opposed the endangerment finding, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have in recent years acknowledged the scientific reality of climate change.

Several also told the EPA that they were concerned about the legal implications of the agency’s proposal. They said they worried that some states would enact stricter greenhouse gas policies in response, forcing companies to respond to a patchwork of laws in different parts of the country.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Lisa Friedman/Tierney L. Cross
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