The EPA Just Issued Its Most Damaging Climate Change Move Ever

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In the most detrimental climate change–related regulatory action ever, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed this week to withdraw its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases “endanger public health or welfare.” EPA had consistently invoked this endangerment finding in its regulatory actions, including during the Trump administration’s first term.

In addition, EPA proposed to repeal all its greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks. To justify these deeply misguided actions, the agency engaged in a shocking display of professional ineptitude, invoking legal, scientific, and economic arguments so weak that, if raised before a court, they might trigger disciplinary sanctions.

In its legal claims, EPA argued that the definition of “air pollutant” for the purposes of the Clean Air Act applies only to “local and regional” pollution, not to global pollution like greenhouse gas emissions. The “local and regional” limitation does not appear anywhere in the text of the statute. Quite to the contrary, the definition of “welfare” in the Clean Air Act includes “effects on … weather … and climate.” The Supreme Court has recently made clear that “when Congress chooses not to include any exceptions to a broad rule, courts apply the broad rule.” EPA has violated this clear command in making up a limitation out of whole cloth.

Besides running roughshod over the statute, EPA also ignored at least three important Supreme Court decisions related to climate change. Massachusetts v. EPA, a case that also involved EPA’s authority to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, explicitly rejects EPA’s argument that the Clean Air Act’s vehicle provisions apply only to local or regional pollutants. The court was clear that the “statutory text forecloses EPA’s reading” that “Congress did not intend it to regulate substances that con­tribute to climate change.”

EPA also mischaracterized UARG v. EPA, claiming that this case established that the agency “may not treat greenhouse gases as a pollutant” for the purposes of two other important Clean Air Act programs. In fact, in UARG, the court did exactly the opposite, upholding EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under these programs in certain circumstances.

And EPA ignored American Electric Power v. Connecticut, which held that the Clean Air Act “authorize[s] EPA to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions,” which are the most prevalent vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, under a range of Clean Air Act programs. This ruling is squarely at odds with EPA’s central claim in its new proposal.

As to the science, EPA claimed that “reducing GHG emissions from such vehicles to zero would not measurably impact GHG concentrations in the atmosphere or the rate of global climate change.” The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., and only China emits more greenhouse gases than the U.S. If zeroing out the emissions of one of the largest sources of climate pollution makes no difference, then nothing that any country could do would likely matter. EPA is essentially saying that we are doomed to the adverse consequences of climate change.

EPA also called into question the well-established scientific consensus on the harmful effects of climate change, claiming, for example, that the 2009 endangerment finding “was unduly pessimistic in attributing health risks from heat waves to increases in global temperature.” On this point, it relied heavily on a report by five self-proclaimed “dissenters” from the scientific consensus who were handpicked by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

EPA paid lip service to scientific “transparency and reliability.” But in its repeated invocation of the contrarian report, it violated the most basic scientific norms. The authors were not independent experts picked through a public process, and their report has not yet been subject to public comment or independent peer review. In contrast, EPA’s prior work on climate change, most recently its 2023 report on the adverse impacts of greenhouse gases (which the agency now ignored altogether), complied with the scientific gold standard in terms of the selection of the experts and the vetting of the report.

EPA fares no better on economics than it did on law and science. In its analysis, EPA cast aside the two major classes of benefits for the vehicle rules: greenhouse gas emissions reductions and savings in gasoline costs. The agency ignored the benefits of greenhouse gas reductions altogether, pretending they don’t exist. On fuel savings, EPA dismissed, with little explanation, the “energy efficiency paradox,” which establishes that, for myopia and other reasons, consumers undervalue the energy savings that will accrue to them over time from purchasing more efficient cars or appliances. EPA’s analysis merely shows—tautologically—that if one ignores the benefits of regulation, regulation has only costs.

In its cynical attempt to avoid addressing climate change, EPA is wrong on law, science, and economics. Its cruel, head-in-the-sand, misguided efforts are nothing but an embarrassment.

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