13-03-2025
EPA's "swing for the fences" attempt to redo climate policy
On a day featuring a blitz of environmental regulatory actions, the EPA on Wednesday announced two particularly sweeping climate change moves.
Why it matters: The moves reveal the administration's strategy to "revisit" or "revise" both the social cost of carbon as well as the 16-year-old endangerment finding.
The social cost of carbon — which puts a price on each ton of climate pollution — is a metric helping shape government regulations, making how it is set extremely influential.
The endangerment finding serves as the scientific justification for regulating greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
Driving the news: The EPA announcement shows that the Trump administration intends to either rescind or modify the endangerment finding by bringing in new considerations and calling upon multiple agencies to contribute to the effort.
These include the cost of regulations flowing from the finding itself down to the level of automobiles and factories, rather than by directly attacking the science.
Challenging the science would be fraught, given the absence of any new research that has called into doubt the reality and severity of human-caused climate change.
Instead, the science has pointed to increasingly obvious and severe present–day and forthcoming climate damages.
The finding — issued in the wake of a 2007 Supreme Court ruling — held that six greenhouse gases endanger "both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations."
Democrats further defined planet-warming emissions as air pollutants under federal law in the Inflation Reduction Act.
What they're saying: The administration appears to seek "to either rescind or modify the endangerment finding using a new approach with the apparent goal of disabling EPA from regulating greenhouse gas pollution, even though the Supreme Court has already upheld the agency's legal authority to do so," Harvard University law professor Jody Freeman said in an email to Axios.
"It's a very aggressive, swing for the fences-sounding announcement, meant to send a political message, which is, we don't care about climate change," she said.
Between the lines: The approach will also encompass a review of "all of its prior regulations and actions that rely on the Endangerment Finding," the agency said.
"EPA's regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy — jobs, wages, and family budgets. It's long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding," Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said in a statement.
The EPA's announcement zeroed in on what the agency says were flaws in how the finding has been used for regulatory purposes.
"When EPA made the Endangerment Finding in 2009, the agency did not consider any aspect of the regulations that would flow from it," it said in a statement.
The big picture: The EPA plans to tap into expertise at OMB, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies as part of its review, the agency said.
The intrigue: When it comes to the social cost of carbon, EPA said it's revising that calculation, too.
Technically, the social cost of carbon is a dollar estimate of the damages caused by emitting one additional metric ton of greenhouse gases into the air.
Over the years, each administration has raised and lowered the number, but this goes further than merely setting it at a level and could reshape it for future administrations as well.
Republicans have long criticized the metric, and Trump set it at $1 during his first term.
"The Biden-Harris administration's so-called 'social cost of carbon' measurement was used to advance their climate agenda in a way that imposed major costs," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement. "To Power the Great American Comeback, we are fully committed to removing regulations holding back the U.S."
House Republicans have sought to add riders to spending bills that would ban virtually any use of the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases.
A bill in the last Congress sponsored by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the RESTART Act, would prohibit any social cost estimate that raises energy costs or prolongs agency actions.
What's next: Lawsuits, and lots of them, to try to stop the EPA's new climate actions.
Go deeper:
Trump plan to gut science behind EPA climate rules faces long odds, experts say
