WASHINGTON (AP) — In a potential landmark action, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has privately urged the Trump administration to reconsider a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change.
In a report to the White House, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called for a rewrite of the agency's finding that determined planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, according to four people who were briefed on the matter but spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the recommendation is not public.
The 2009 finding under the Clean Air Act is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources.
A spokesperson for the EPA on Wednesday declined to reveal Zeldin's recommendation, which was made last week under an executive order from Republican President Donald Trump. The order, issued on Trump's first day in office, directed the EPA to submit a report "on the legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding.
The Washington Post first reported that Zeldin had urged the White House to strike down the endangerment finding.
The Obama-era finding “is the linchpin of the federal government's policies for what the president and I call the climate hoax," said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who disputes mainstream science on climate change.
"If you pull this (finding) out, everything EPA does on climate goes away,'' Milloy told the AP.
Trump, at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, said Zeldin told him he is moving to eliminate about 65% of the EPA's workforce. “A lot of people that weren’t doing their job, they were just obstructionist," Trump said.
Myron Ebell, another former Trump transition adviser who has questioned the science behind climate change, said Wednesday he was “very excited” at Zeldin's apparent recommendation on endangerment.
“It's the basis of all the economically damaging rules to regulate carbon dioxide,” Ebell said, calling repeal “a hard step, but a very big step.”
Environmental groups and legal experts said any attempt to repeal or roll back the endangerment finding would be an uphill task with a slim chance of success.
“This would be a fool's errand,'' said David Doniger, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “In the face of overwhelming science, it’s impossible to think that the EPA could develop a contradictory finding that would stand up in court."
Trump, who has repeatedly denounced what he calls a “green new scam” pushed by Democrats and environmentalists, may view a repeal of the endangerment finding as a "kill shot'' that would allow him to make all climate regulations invalid, Doniger said.
"But it's a real long shot for them,'' he added, noting that courts repeatedly have upheld the EPA's authority to regulate pollution from greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
“The directive to reconsider the endangerment finding comes straight from Project 2025 and is both cynical and deeply concerning given the mountain of scientific evidence supporting the finding, the devastating climate harms Americans are experiencing right now and EPA’s clear obligation to protect Americans’ health and welfare,'' said Peter Zalzal, a senior lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, another environmental group.
Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page blueprint for a hard-right turn in American government and society, includes a recommendation to reconsider the endangerment finding.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, New York, has been a longtime Trump ally but had little environmental experience before being named to the EPA post. At his confirmation hearing in January, he sparred with Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., over a Supreme Court decision that led to the endangerment finding.
In a 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, the court held that the agency has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Markey called the decision a "mandate” for the EPA to protect the public health from climate pollution, a point Zeldin disputed.
“The decision does not require the EPA" to act on greenhouse gases, “it authorizes it,” Zeldin told Markey. “There are steps the EPA would have to take in order for an obligation to be created.”
Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the UCLA School of Law, said any effort to overturn the endangerment finding would “raise more havoc — part of the administration’s overall strategy to flood the zone" with chaotic actions and directives.
“The science could not be clearer that greenhouse gas emissions have already led the earth to warm — so much so that it now appears we have breached the 1.5 Celsius limit" set by the global community in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Carlson said.
“We are seeing the effects of climate change on the ground and across the globe in the form of hotter temperatures, more frequent drought, more intense flooding, fiercer hurricanes and more intense wildfires," she said,
If the endangerment finding is upended, “the havoc will happen sooner and more sweepingly," she said.
University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann called the EPA's action “just the latest form of Republican climate denial. They can no longer deny climate change is happening, so instead they’re pretending it’s not a threat, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is, perhaps, the greatest threat that we face today.”
“The notion that the greenhouse gases do not endanger public health and welfare by causing climate change is preposterous,'' added Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. Climate change caused by greenhouse gas pollution “is already interrupting life as we knew it in the last century and threatening much worse to come. To believe otherwise is a fantasy."
___
Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this story.
Matthew Daly, The Associated Press
