The Trump EPA will unveil a landmark proposal to rescind the Obama-era legal basis that allows the federal government to regulate gas-powered vehicle emissions and enforce a de facto electric vehicle mandate.
The proposal would formally remove the agency's determination issued by the Obama administration in 2009 that greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane, endanger public health and must be regulated. The Biden EPA used that determination, known as the endangerment finding, to force automakers to sell more electric vehicles.
The endangerment finding has also undergirded a variety of other environmental regulations targeting both the transportation and power sectors.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposal during an interview with the Ruthless podcast on Tuesday morning. "This will basically drive a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion," he said, adding that the 2009 finding enabled the federal government to regulate segments of the U.S. economy "out of existence."
If it is finalized and implemented, the action could represent one of the Trump administration's signature actions to curb federal climate regulatory power, boost the American economy, and promote its aggressive energy agenda. The proposal also marks the latest and perhaps most devastating setback for climate activists and lawmakers who have heralded the 2009 finding for years.
"It is the activating document to the entirety of our substantive greenhouse gas regulations," former EPA chief of staff Mandy Gunasekara told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview.
"If they get rid of the endangerment finding, then the rationale for all federal action on climate kind of goes away," added Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.
Overall, the Obama-era finding has formed the basis of federal tailpipe emissions regulations, including the Biden-era rules forcing automakers to sell more electric vehicles; Biden-era and Obama-era rules tightening restrictions on coal-fired power plants; and Biden-era rules clamping down on methane emissions from oil and gas field operations. It has also played a role in the Transportation Department's fuel economy standards for new vehicles and government-wide green energy spending.
Fossil fuels still produce more than 80 percent of the nation's energy—regulating greenhouse gas emissions, therefore, gives the EPA the ability to "become the regulator of the entire economy and society," said Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment.
The EPA estimates that vehicle regulations stemming from the finding alone have cost Americans more than $1 trillion.
The proposal Tuesday would empower the EPA to quickly reverse those and other regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions.
That explains why environmental groups have vigorously lined up against the Trump administration's reconsideration of the finding, which they argue is vital in the fight to stave off cataclysmic global warming. "Removing the endangerment finding even as climate chaos accelerates is like spraying gasoline on a burning house," Jason Rylander, a legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity, warned after Zeldin kicked off a formal reconsideration of the finding in March.
The issue dates back to the 1970s when Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which requires the EPA to regulate any air pollutant emitted by mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like power plants, which the EPA determines causes or contributes to pollution that endangers public health or welfare. For decades, the EPA did not interpret that provision to include greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane.
A coalition of states led by Massachusetts eventually sued the EPA after it formally determined in 2003 that the Clean Air Act did not authorize it to consider greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the states and directed the EPA to consider whether greenhouse gas emissions do, in fact, endanger public health, leading to the 2009 endangerment finding.
Michael Buschbacher, a former counsel at the Department of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division, said the Trump administration's proposal will likely be challenged in court and that the administration should tread carefully when crafting its language.
"Unless this is done really, really well, this has the potential of being a kind of regulatory Vietnam, which is surely what administration opponents will be trying to accomplish," Buschbacher told the Free Beacon. "But if ever there were a team to do it, it's the squad Administrator Zeldin has assembled and regulatory czar Jeffrey Bossert Clark at the White House."