CLIMATEWIRE | A significant enigma of President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is its plan to dismantle the endangerment finding, a core element underpinning numerous climate change regulations.
It appears that clues to their approach have been evident for some time, particularly since the EPA declared a series of deregulatory initiatives one afternoon a month ago.
Experts believe the EPA might be strategizing to overturn the scientific determination that has enabled national regulations on climate emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sectors, without directly challenging the vast evidence supporting that greenhouse gases are escalating global temperatures.
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Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, and other appointees by the president in January to repeal the finding might question the extent of climate pollution contributions from specific sectors or the entire country on a global scale to justify regulation.
They could also seek to redefine the public health risks posed by air pollution, a critical step needed for the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
“Maybe they’ll change their course, but they seem to have a plan for revoking the finding,” stated Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA air chief during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Eliminating the endangerment finding could enable the Trump administration to fundamentally remove climate regulations, bypassing the lengthy process of establishing weaker alternative rules, as per experts. This action would also complicate future efforts by other administrations to regulate sectors contributing to climate change, as the scientific determination would need to be reinstated first.
Experts have observed indications of this strategy in a detailed press release issued by the agency last month, announcing a slew of steps to rollback climate regulations.
Holmstead described the document as “very telling.”
He and other experts suggest the administration might focus on how regulatory costs affect energy and other vital aspects of American life, rather than confronting atmospheric science head-on. This could allow the EPA to avoid the time-consuming task of assembling panels of dissenting scientists to dispute the clear connection between human emissions and global warming.
“They can probably release it in the next few months,” Holmstead remarked about a proposed endangerment finding that highlights regulatory costs. “They won’t need to spend much time — and Federal Register pages — reviewing the science.”
While the EPA did not respond to requests for comment for this article, Zeldin recently shared more details in a contentious press conference about his plans to revise the finding. He mentioned that the agency intends to initiate a formal rulemaking process that includes public commentary.
“There isn’t a specific timeline here,” Zeldin noted, in response to a query by POLITICO’s E&E News. “As we proceed with the various actions we’re starting rulemakings on, each will adhere to the Administrative Procedures Act, ensuring that the actions we undertake are as robust as possible.”
This suggests that the endangerment finding won’t be swiftly abolished through an executive order, unlike Trump’s recent executive action on water-saving showerheads.
However, the EPA could still move rapidly to rescind the finding.
“It’s going to happen,” stated Michael McKenna, an energy lobbyist who led Trump’s transition team at the Department of Energy in 2017. “It’s merely a matter of when it will occur, what it will entail, and how long it will take.”
McKenna noted that some individuals in Trump’s circle have been contemplating how to revise the endangerment finding for over 15 years — since it was finalized under President Barack Obama, who established the first rules based on it.
“If they didn’t have actual text, they had pretty well-developed theories about what it was going to look like,” he added.
Old Finding, New Costs
The 2009 finding asserts two prerequisites for Clean Air Act regulation of heat-trapping gases. One is that six greenhouse gases now and in the future endanger public health and welfare. The other is that new motor vehicles emit greenhouse gases that endanger public health—a finding that has been extended to power plants, oil and gas facilities, and other sectors emitting climate pollution. This stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA has the authority to regulate these gases under the Clean Air Act if they are found to endanger public health.
Conservative lawyers and analysts believe there is room to challenge Obama-era assertions about the extent of the threat posed by greenhouse gases, without attacking the fundamental principles of climate science.
This is particularly applicable to sectors beyond transportation. Three administrations have utilized a section of the Clean Air Act—Section 111—to regulate climate pollution at power plants and oil and gas facilities. This section requires the EPA to determine that a sector “significantly contributes to harmful air pollution” before it can regulate.
The EPA’s press release from March was among a flurry of deregulatory actions. However, its decision to tackle the finding—which the first Trump administration chose not to do—received the most attention.
And it was clear about the perceived shortcomings in the Obama-era finding that could be crucial in overturning it.
“When the EPA made the endangerment finding in 2009, the agency did not consider any aspects of the regulations that would result from it,” stated the agency in its revealing press release. “At that time, the EPA’s view was that the finding itself did not impose any costs, and that future costs could not be considered when making the finding.”
But the finding was a prerequisite for regulations that imposed unforeseen costs on industries—and Americans—that were not anticipated in the Obama administration’s rulemaking.
“Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories,” stated Jeff Clark, who oversees regulatory review at the White House, in the March statement.
If the EPA decides to make costs a central aspect of its endangerment finding revision, it could lower the social cost of greenhouse gases—as it did during Trump’s first term—and use this to argue that the environmental benefits of regulation are outweighed by economic costs. It could also attempt to quantify economic benefits from deregulation—or even from warmer temperatures—and balance these against a reduced assessment of climate damages.
But Vicki Arroyo, who served as EPA policy chief under former President Joe Biden, said that the time to weigh the costs and benefits of a specific rule comes later—when the EPA is proposing the regulation.
“The endangerment finding should just focus on whether the science is compelling and shows that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and therefore pose an endangerment to human health and the environment,” said Arroyo, now a professor at Georgetown Law School. “How costly or cost-effective it might be to address those emissions, that’s a later question that relates to what you’re going to do about it.”
‘Changing the Subject’
The March press release also criticized the Obama EPA’s “flawed and unorthodox” decision to group all six greenhouse gases together when assessing their danger to human health. And it questioned whether individual categories of emissions, like cars, require their own endangerment findings for each gas.
This might indicate that the EPA is preparing to argue that individual U.S. economic sectors need their own findings to assess their contribution to global climate change. The EPA might assert that their contributions aren’t significant enough to pose a danger—undermining any justification for regulations.
“The EPA might end up agreeing that humans are significantly contributing to observed warming globally. But the United States isn’t alone,” said Patrick Traylor, who served as EPA deputy assistant administrator for compliance in the first Trump administration. “So, I mean, the EPA might decide not to make endangerment policy based on U.S. emissions alone.”
“Or the EPA might slice that even finer and say, ‘Well, maybe even if domestic contributions could be viewed as a significant force of observed warming, this industry, that sector, each individually, can’t be,’” said Traylor, now a partner in the environmental and natural resources practice at Vinson & Elkins.
But Joe Goffman, who served as EPA air chief under Biden, said focusing on a narrower set of carbon sources would give a false sense that regulations are always futile, because single sources will always contribute only a sliver of global emissions.
“Just because one pollutant from one particular source interacts with other pollutants from other sources to create the problem, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contribute to the problem,” he said.
The EPA press release stated that the time was ripe for a review of whether U.S. efforts at adaptation and mitigation had made the country less vulnerable to climate change.
But Goffman called that “a massive exercise in changing the subject.”
“Everything cited in the March announcement goes to whether or not regulatory action is justifiable or preferable, not to whether or not these molecules operate in the atmosphere in a particular way,” he said.
“Because it’s a much harder question, isn’t it, to say ‘Yes, these gases cause a threat to public health and the environment, but we don’t want to act on that.’”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
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