The Fight Over US Climate Rules Is Just Beginning

On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to roll back the endangerment finding, which underpins the US’s ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The rollback, the result of more than 15 years of work from right-wing special interest groups, represents the most aggressive move against climate regulation in the US to date—and will introduce a lengthy fight that’s almost certain to wind up in front of the Supreme Court.

The move could also create significant legal and regulatory uncertainty for a wide swath of industries, from oil companies fighting state and local climate lawsuits to car companies attempting to plan production of new models in the midst of an ongoing legal fight.

“I don’t see any plan, any strategy, any end game,” says Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont. “I don’t see anything from this administration, just fuck everything up as much as you can. You can print that.”

The Clean Air Act mandates that the EPA regulate any type of air pollution that might constitute a hazard to public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is a 2009 ruling that creates a scientific and legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the bedrock for every climate-based regulation the agency has issued since, from restrictions on power plants to emissions standards for cars.

The original finding was mandated by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, in a case brought by the state against the Bush administration, challenging it for not taking action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. The Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Even before the endangerment finding officially came into existence, it was already a political football for right-wing interests. Following the Supreme Court decision, the Bush-era EPA sent an email to the White House linking six greenhouse gases to climate change and detailing a number of disparate impacts on public health and the environment. However, the White House refused to open the email to acknowledge the science and the finding, kicking the can down the road for nearly two years until the email was released in 2009 under the Obama administration. Right-wing groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the Project 2025 plan, have been vocal critics of the ruling and the EPA’s actions on greenhouse gases for nearly two decades. (As The New York Times reported on Monday, the Heritage Foundation funded a campaign in 2022 to help create regulatory documents that enabled the repeal of the endangerment finding.)

The endangerment finding has proven remarkably difficult for these groups to attack. Both of Trump’s first EPA administrators declined to challenge the finding while they were in office, despite pressure from ideologues inside and out of that administration.

This hesitancy was thanks in part to businesses supporting the original EPA ruling. “Industry has generally been in favor of stability in this space and having EPA maintain its regulatory authority,” says Meghan Greenfield, a former senior counsel at the EPA. “The endangerment finding serves this really important purpose in providing a level playing field and acknowledging EPA’s authority.”

A draft version of the rollback released this summer contained a myriad of arguments aimed at undermining the finding, including making the case that because greenhouse gas emissions are global, they should not be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

“The proposal pretty much threw spaghetti on the wall,” says Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s just all kinds of arguments, all of them without merit—Clean Air Act arguments, science arguments, cost arguments.”