Regulating climate emissions just became more difficult. US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repealed its own 2009 legal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health.
Vindicated by a Supreme Court ruling in 2007, and based on scientific evidence, this so-called endangerment finding by the EPA provided the legal warrant for the regulation of greenhouse gases by the federal government. It underpinned the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulated emissions from power plants. In his first term, Trump had tried to weaken it but a new version was introduced by the Biden administration.
Without the endangerment finding, and in the absence of new laws passed by both Houses of Congress, the federal government lacks the legal mandate for direct regulation of greenhouse emissions. The science hasn’t changed, but the obligation to act on it has been scrubbed out.
