Trump Scraps Climate Stance Backing Emissions-Cutting Rules (3)

President Donald Trump said his administration has rescinded the “endangerment finding,” a landmark scientific determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare.

The 2009 finding serves as the legal foundation for a variety of environmental rules, including federal climate standards for cars and trucks. Trump said he’s also repealing those vehicle-related standards.

“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry, and massively drove up prices for American consumers,” Trump told reporters Thursday at the White House. “This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory cost and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically.”

The decision to repeal, which has been telegraphed for months, lays the groundwork for unwinding more federal climate regulations, according to environmental and legal experts. Thursday’s announcement, made alongside Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, marks the administration’s most consequential climate rollback, as well as its biggest deregulatory move.

This is the “single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America,” Zeldin said.

The move comes roughly six months after he first proposed it, a remarkably fast turnaround for a high-impact change that garnered more than 500,000 public comments.

Read More: How Trump Is Scrapping the Bedrock of Climate Rules: QuickTake

Republican members of Congress, along with conservative policy and legal experts, have endorsed the move. “The endangerment finding went too far,” said Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I’m sure it will be litigated, but I feel confident that [the administration is] on firm ground.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom, as well as multiple environmental groups, have already pledged to challenge the decision in 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,” Newsom said in a statement.

An Environmental Defense Fund analysis found these repeals could cost Americans up to an extra $1.4 trillion in fuel between now and 2055, in addition to increasing climate pollution as much as 18 billion metric tons and resulting in up to $4.2 trillion of climate-linked damages.

“It is just ludicrous to think that we can actually have the EPA decide not to consider climate impacts at all when it’s been clearly made to be an essential component of how we have to regulate and it’s been done by the Supreme Court,” said Gina McCarthy, who served as EPA administrator for then-President Barack Obama.

The endangerment finding’s origins date back to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on a case where the Bush-era EPA argued that the Clean Air Act didn’t cover greenhouse gases. The nation’s highest court ruled against the EPA at the time and ordered the agency to determine if those gases posed an environmental threat.

Ultimately, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases were a threat — in the endangerment finding that the agency issued two years later during the Obama administration. This compelled officials to address global warming emissions from vehicles under the Clean Air Act. In 2010, the first greenhouse gas vehicle standards were issued.

Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior attorney David Doniger said the latest move is an attempt to recycle the Bush administration’s arguments in hopes of getting the issue before a more sympathetic Supreme Court. At least three times since 2007, the Supreme Court has taken up challenges to EPA greenhouse gas rules, brought by fossil-fuel companies, climate skeptics and attorneys general in Republican-led states, and each time they declined to reconsider the original decision.

The evidence for human-caused global warming was overwhelming in 2009, when the endangerment finding was published, and has strengthened since. The hottest 25 years in records dating back to 1850 have all occurred since 1998, with the last 10 years being the warmest. The last three years were so hot globally that climate scientists have begun to debate whether the world is heating up faster than projected.

Back in September, three former EPA chiefs, including McCarthy, wrote to the agency voicing their opposition to repealing the endangerment finding. Many state and local officials, businesses and scientists pushed back as well. The US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine submitted a 137-report as a public comment, concluding that the evidence that greenhouse gases harm human health is “beyond scientific dispute.”

The rollbacks will most immediately affect the car industry, which has already slowed its transition to electric vehicles under Trump. These actions mean Americans will save over $2,400 on new vehicles, said Zeldin, and automakers will no longer “be pressured to shift their fleets towards electric vehicles.”

“As a cherry on top,” he added, the federal government is ending the push to get manufacturers to install a feature that shuts off car engines when stopped at a red light. This design feature can boost a vehicle’s fuel economy and can shrink the carbon dioxide emissions per mile of vehicles.

Auto industry groups expressed muted optimism for the repeal. “I’ve said it before: Automotive emissions regulations finalized in the previous administration are extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace for EVs,” said John Bozzella, president and chief executive officer for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

The administration’s cost savings estimates do not appear to account for the costs of climate impacts, nor will they likely be felt by Americans right away. “Vehicle makers have very long planning cycles and the revocation of the endangerment finding won’t have much practical impact in the near term,” Jeffrey Holmstead, a former top air official at the EPA who now heads the Environmental Strategies Group at the firm Bracewell, said in a statement.

Trump’s announcement follows the agency’s decision to drop a longstanding policy of factoring in the monetary value of avoided deaths from reduced air pollution when drafting certain rules. Earlier this month, Trump also withdrew the US from several key UN climate bodies working on global climate cooperation, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

(Adds chart and updates on auto industry impact starting in 18th paragraph.)

--With assistance from Derek Wallbank, Kailey Leinz and Ryan Beene.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Zahra Hirji in Washington at zhirji@bloomberg.net;
Courtney Subramanian in Washington at csubramani10@bloomberg.net;
Eric Roston in New York at eroston@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Ana Campoy at acampoy@bloomberg.net

Justin Sink, Tim Quinson

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