In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency was accused of abandoning its mission to protect public health after revoking the “endangerment finding” that has served as the basis for federal climate change regulations for 17 years.
The lawsuit comes from more than a dozen environmental and health groups, including the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Clean Air Council, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The groups have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the EPA’s decision, which also eliminated requirements controlling greenhouse gas emissions in new cars and trucks. Urging a return to the status quo, the groups argued that despite a mountain of evidence demonstrating the deadly consequences of uncontrolled pollution and climate change-induced floods, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes, the Trump administration is anti-science and is moving to illegally benefit the fossil fuel industry.
“Undermining the federal government’s ability to tackle the largest source of climate pollution is deadly serious,” Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at NRDC, said in an EDF roundup of the plaintiffs’ statements.
The groups argued that the science is largely clear, despite the Trump EPA attempting to muddy the waters by forming a disbanded working group of climate opponents.
Trump is a longtime climate denier, as evidenced by the Euro News Tracker tracking his most controversial comments. Recently, during the severe cold snap affecting much of the US, he predictably trolled environmentalists, writing on Truth Social, “Can the eco rebels please explain – what happened to global warming?”
The EPA’s final rule summary claims “This is the largest regulation action in U.S. history and will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion by 2055”. Supposedly, carmakers will no longer pass on any savings to meet emissions requirements, giving Americans more access to cheaper cars by locking in costly emissions and EVs have “strangled” the auto industry. Sounding nothing like an agency created to monitor polluters, a fact sheet on the final rule emphasizes that Trump’s EPA “chooses consumer choice over climate change euphoria every time.”
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