The climate is no longer the US government’s problem. On Thursday, the Trump administration rolled back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution. Trump says he believes climate change is a hoax, and has withdrawn the United States from global efforts to combat it.
President Trump officially disavowed scientific research that labels CO2 as a polluting greenhouse gas. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) no longer believes that greenhouse gases “endanger public health and welfare.”
“The Trump EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy non-profit National Resources Defense Council. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis.”
Obama
In climate-change denial, the Environmental Protection Agency is abandoning a principle it itself established in 2009, during the Obama presidency. It relies on a small group of advisors who question the severity of global warming and downplay the role of greenhouse gases. The report was fiercely criticized by climate experts.
The finding that CO2 and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare established a legal basis to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Its overturning will be a “devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters”, said Hankins. The rollback is sure to draw legal challenges.
Paris Climate Agreement
Based on the original “danger assessment,” the EPA issued regulations for fifteen years, covering issues such as power plant emissions and vehicle fuel consumption.
In the latest version, under President Joe Biden, these regulations were intended to help ensure that the US would emit only half as many greenhouse gases by 2050 as it did in 2005. That principle had already been abandoned under Donald Trump. At the end of last month, he withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement.
The president believes the US should focus heavily on oil, gas, and coal. On Wednesday, he announced that the Department of Defense will source part of its electricity needs from coal-fired power plants.
‘Undeniable’
Gretchen Goldman, president of the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions was evident in 2009, and it’s even more undeniable today.”
The Environmental Defense Fund has already promised to sue the EPA over the rule. Also, Abigail Dillen, president of the green legal organization Earthjustice, said her group “will see the Trump administration in court”.
Supreme Court
“EPA has a legal obligation to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act,” she continued. “The American public deserves a government that will face the challenge of the climate crisis head-on, with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as agents of destruction by worsening it to boost fossil fuel profits.”
EPA’s decision will certainly be challenged in court, with a final ruling by the Supreme Court likely in one or two years. All this time, it will remain unclear for the automotive industry, for example, whether to invest in developing more economical gasoline engines or electric models.
