The Trump administration is set this week to overturn an Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday.
Repealing the so-called endangerment finding, a scientific determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, would remove the legal foundation for broader greenhouse gas regulation and would mark the Trump administration’s most wide-reaching climate policy rollback.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the repeal is expected to be published later this week, and cited EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin saying it would amount to “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.”
The Trump administration has been working on the repeal for over a year. The proposed rule was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review on January 7. The proposal, unveiled last summer, got over a half a million public comments.
The repeal would remove the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal GHG emission standards for cars, administration officials told the Wall Street Journal, but would not apply to stationary sources such as power plants.
An EPA spokesperson said the endangerment finding was used by the Obama and Biden Administrations to “justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines.”
On January 30, a federal court ruled that the Department of Energy violated the law when it formed a climate science advisory group whose report was meant to support the EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding, potentially making the final rule vulnerable to legal challenges.
While many industry groups backed the repeal of vehicle emission standards, many were reluctant to show public support for rescinding the endangerment finding because of the legal and regulatory uncertainty it would unleash.
Last month, the American Petroleum Institute said it supported a repeal of the endangerment finding for vehicles but said it should be left in place for stationary sources, which would require the EPA to regulate the potent greenhouse gas called methane from the oil and gas sector.
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici and David Shepardson in Washington; additional reporting by Devika Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Sonali Paul)