Trump EPA’s most extreme environmental rollback is expected to spike pollution, raise gas prices
On July 29, the Trump administration took an unprecedented step toward unraveling the federal government’s ability to regulate air pollution.
In what is seen as a gift to the fossil fuel industry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that his agency was moving to repeal the “Endangerment Finding,” the scientific finding that greenhouse gas pollution threatens public health and welfare, which affirms the legal basis for the EPA’s responsibility to limit this pollution.
Experts say the move will unleash pollution, increase costs and threaten jobs.
Environmental Defense Fund attorney Stephanie Jones breaks down what’s at stake.
First, what exactly is the Trump administration trying to undo?
Back in 2009, after reviewing a mountain of scientific evidence, the EPA established what is called the “Endangerment Finding.” In simple terms, this finding recognizes that greenhouse gas pollution harms our health and welfare, and because of that, the EPA has a legal responsibility to limit it. In the years since then, the EPA has set sensible standards to reduce climate pollution from the biggest sources — like cars and trucks, power plants and the oil and gas sector.
Now, based on debunked scientific theories and faulty legal arguments that the Supreme Court has already rejected, the Trump administration is saying that the EPA lacks the authority to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act. The administration is trying to eliminate the Endangerment Finding itself as well as all limits on climate pollution from vehicles and power plants.
Why? Has anything changed that would justify this move?
The EPA isn’t proposing this repeal based on new scientific evidence. In fact, they’re doing it despite science.
Because the Trump administration couldn’t justify this industry giveaway based on the best and latest scientific research, they hand-picked a group of climate skeptics to tell them what they wanted to hear.
[Editor’s note: On August 12, EDF and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s use of a secretly convened group to prepare a now widely disparaged report. The lawsuit states that the Federal Advisory Committee Act mandates transparency, including requiring meetings, emails and other records of federal advisory committees be open to the public.]
The truth is that the scientific evidence that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and welfare has only gotten stronger. In fact, a peer-reviewed study found that there is more and better evidence for every area of climate-driven harms that the EPA originally examined in 2009 — public health, air quality, food security, water resources and more.
We see this firsthand too. The climate is already changing because of greenhouse gas pollution, shifting weather patterns in ways that threaten our health, safety and communities. Droughts and floods are becoming more severe, affecting food security. More powerful wildfires are destroying homes and harming air quality. On the day that Trump’s EPA announced its proposal to eliminate the Endangerment Finding, about half of the U.S. population was under a heat advisory.
The bottom line is no — there is no justification for unleashing this pollution. It harms our health and the climate. What we actually need is less pollution — not more.
How will this affect me?
If the Trump administration succeeds in its attempt to repeal key EPA protections, it will spike air pollution and likely cause gas prices to rise. In fact, the federal government’s own report found that repealing greenhouse gas standards would increase the price of gasoline.
So, to try to shore up its claims that this proposal would create cost savings, the Trump EPA made up highly unrealistic scenarios, like Americans only driving a newly purchased vehicle for 2.5 years or gas prices falling by $1/gallon.
The agency also conspicuously left out the pollution impact of a repeal from its proposal, so experts at EDF did an analysis and found that it would result in at least 10 billion tons of additional climate pollution through 2055 (that’s nearly twice the amount the U.S. emitted last year) and thousands of tons of harmful smog and soot-forming pollution.
All of this added pollution is projected to cause 12,000 premature deaths and 8.5 million more asthma attacks, not to mention further acceleration of the destructive floods, fires and storms that Americans are already facing at unprecedented levels.
Is there anything I can do about this?
Yes. Your voice matters in this process. The law requires the EPA to consider and respond to public input on its proposal. This creates a record that can be crucial to challenging the Trump administration’s harmful actions in court later.
To share your views with the agency, you can participate in a public hearing or submit written comments.
