EPA poised to ignore landmark finding that will limit its battle against climate change

Independent

4 days ago

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken another step toward ending its own ability to fight the climate crisis.
The agency is considering scrapping a 2009 scientific 'endangerment finding' that confirmed greenhouse gases from the oil and gas industry, and other sources, endangered people's health, so there was reason to regulate them under the 1970 Clean Air Act.
'On Monday, June 30, 2025, EPA sent over its 'Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards' proposal to the Office of Management and Budget, which was originally announced on March 12, 2025,' an EPA spokesperson told The Independent, in an email Wednesday. 'The proposal will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator.'
EPA did not respond to The Independent's questions regarding the potential impacts of a rollback. But if the 2009 finding is rescinded, it would erase EPA limits on greenhouse gas pollution across industries, adding to dozens of rollbacks in federal climate and environmental policy by the Trump administration.
Over the past 15 years, the endangerment finding has helped to reduce climate pollution and protect Americans' health, bolstering limits on power plants and emissions standards for trucks and other vehicles. If rolled back, limits on tailpipe emissions would be overturned and automakers could make cars that guzzle more gas.
Climate scientists and activists said tossing the 2009 ruling would throttle the U.S.'s ability to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change, and would endanger people around the world in the name of the Trump administration's push for energy dominance.
"If you're busily committing a crime, it's smart to try and change the law so that it's not technically a crime any more,' author and Third Act founder Bill McKibben said, on the proposal. 'Big Oil is not content to merely wreck the future, they'd like to alter the past as well."
The EPA proposal is still in draft form, sources told The New York Times, so could be changed.
But if it is finalized, legal challenges would almost certainly follow although those could take a year, said Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources.
'But, if this ultimately comes to pass, the consequences will be stark: it essentially would halt all federal actions to regulate heat-trapping and climate change-causing greenhouse gases as a pollutant. That would mark a grim milestone, indeed,' Swain told The Independent.
Dr. Michael E. Mann, the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, had warned of an attack on the 'endangerment finding' a year ago.
'The United States, and a small number of petrostates including Russia and Saudi Arabia, now pose a major threat to the planet. The rest of the world will need to decide what to do about that,' he told The Independent, in an email Wednesday.
Earlier this year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency would reconsider the 2009 finding in what he deemed the 'most consequential day of deregulation in American history.'
'The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas,' he said.
'We will follow the science, the law, and common sense wherever it leads, and we will do so while advancing our commitment towards helping to deliver cleaner, healthier, and safer air, land, and water.'
Under Zeldin, the EPA announced it would shutter its Office of Research and Development, which provides expertise for environmental policy and regulation, and analyzes the dangers of climate change and pollution. The agency is also expected to shed thousands of employees, including chemists, biologists, and toxicologists.
The U.S. has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any country in human history.
Countries are failing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions at a fast enough rate, and temperatures around the world are hitting unprecedented highs. As the planet continues to heat up, extreme weather events will become more severe, the threat of famine and plague rockets, and more species face extinction.