Donald Trump just torched the 2009 endangerment finding, and most Americans probably don’t even know what that is. But here’s why you should care: this obscure EPA ruling from Obama’s first year in office has been the entire legal backbone for federal climate regulation in the United States for over 15 years.
The finding declared that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a genuine threat to public health. Simple enough, right? But that single determination allowed the EPA to regulate emissions from cars, power plants, oil rigs, even aircraft. Without it, the federal government basically has no legal leg to stand on when it comes to forcing industries to cut emissions.
Trump called it Thursday from the Oval Office “a disastrous Obama era policy” and threw in his favorite phrase about the Green New Deal being “one of the greatest scams in history.” The White House is promising over $1 trillion in savings and claims automakers will save $2,400 per vehicle. Cheaper cars for everyone, they say.
The Science That Suddenly Isn’t Science Anymore
Here’s where things get sketchy. The Department of Energy assembled a panel last year to challenge the accepted science on greenhouse gases and warming. That report became the justification for reversing the endangerment finding. The problem? A federal judge recently ruled the department broke the law in how they picked that team. Climate experts have blasted the report as unrepresentative and filled with skeptics who cherry-picked data.
But the Trump administration doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that detail. They’re banking on this ending up at the Supreme Court before his term wraps up. If they win there, the endangerment finding stays dead even after Trump leaves office. No future president could resurrect it without new legislation from Congress, and we all know how well Congress handles climate-related policy.
Environmental groups are already gearing up for a legal war. Peter Zalzal from the Environmental Defense Fund points out that Americans will actually spend about $1.4 trillion more on fuel costs from less efficient vehicles. His group also estimates 58,000 additional premature deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks. Those numbers paint a very different picture than the White House’s rosy economic projections.
The Car Industry Might Not Even Want This
You’d think automakers would be thrilled about relaxed emissions standards, but it’s more complicated than that. Making gas-guzzling cars might save money in the short term, but it could kill their business overseas. Europe and China aren’t rolling back their climate standards. They’re tightening them.
Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert from Columbia University, put it bluntly: “Nobody else is going to want to buy American cars.” That’s a real problem when the global auto market is moving toward electric vehicles and stricter efficiency standards. American manufacturers could end up isolated, producing vehicles the rest of the world considers outdated dinosaurs.
There’s also a weird twist to this whole thing. While Trump was working to overturn the endangerment finding, his administration actually used that same 2009 ruling to block states from passing stricter carbon emission laws. The logic was that only the federal government had authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Now that the finding is gone, states might have a much freer hand to pursue their own aggressive climate policies.
What Happens When Federal Authority Vanishes
Meghan Greenfield, a former EPA and Justice Department attorney, points out something fascinating. The endangerment finding has been used for years to block “nuisance” lawsuits about climate change. The argument was that since the EPA had federal authority over greenhouse gases, individual plaintiffs couldn’t bring their own claims in state courts.
That protection just evaporated. Get ready for a flood of climate litigation in state courts as environmental groups, local governments, and individuals try to figure out what happens in this legal vacuum. Greenfield expects “states and non-profit groups to bring suits, probably primarily in our state courts, to try to figure out where the contours of this new law are.”
The irony is almost perfect. Trump wanted to deregulate his way to cheaper cars and energy independence, but he might have accidentally opened the floodgates to exactly the kind of patchwork state-level regulation and legal chaos that businesses usually hate even more than federal rules.
This isn’t just another regulatory rollback that’ll get reversed when the next Democrat takes office. If the Supreme Court upholds this reversal, the legal architecture for addressing climate change in America fundamentally changes, and there’s no easy way to rebuild it without Congress actually passing real legislation, which seems about as likely as bipartisan agreement on anything these days.
