5 Facts About the Endangerment Finding

While the Trump EPA has droned on about the costs of acting to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it has ignored—quite literally ignored—the real economic damage from climate change. In its proposal, the agency admits: “The EPA does not attempt to monetize the value, if any, of changes in (greenhouse gas) emissions that result from the proposed action.”  
 
Just as the EPA in other rules is ignoring the costs of heart disease and asthma attacks when deciding if it should reduce air pollution, it’s also deliberately excluding climate costs as it moves to gut these standards.  
 
It can try to pretend otherwise, but these costs are very real for all Americans. Last year, in the United States alone, there were 23 extreme weather or climate events, with losses surpassing $1 billion each. The damages from those events—the wildfires in Los Angeles, hailstorms in Texas, and a drought in the Southwest—totaled at least $115 billion. And that may be a low estimate: The tragic burning of homes in Los Angeles alone could cost $95 billion to $164 billion, according to one analysis by UCLA.  
 
Someone needs to pay for all this damage, and right now, fairly or not, that someone is us: Research from the Brookings Institution found that homeowners' insurance costs are already about $350 a year higher because of climate impacts—and are likely to keep rising in the years ahead.  
 
More broadly, an economic analysis published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academies of Science last month estimates that climate change has already slashed Americans' incomes by 12 percent since 2000. 

The EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding was based on extensive review of decades of scientific research and peer-reviewed assessment reports synthesizing thousands of individual climate science studies. In 2019, the climate scientist Phil Duffy and others re-analyzed the existing climate science and published a paper in Science that showed the determination had an even stronger scientific basis: A “compelling case has been made even more compelling with an enormous body of additional data.”  
 
After the EPA relied on the work of a secret, ad hoc U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) “Climate Working Group” to justify its proposed repeal, its work was thoroughly rebuked by 85 real climate scientists. The Climate Working Group became such a joke—and legal liability—that the DOE disbanded the panel, and ever since, the administration has tried to pretend its work never existed.  
 
Meanwhile, in the wake of the administration’s proposal, the prestigious National Academies of Sciences (NAS) reassessed the 2009 determination. Its conclusion was as clear as a church bell tolling: The EPA’s endangerment finding “was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence,” it concluded. This finding is doubly important because the Clean Air Act explicitly requires the EPA to explain why it is diverging from any National Academies analysis.  
 
“The evidence of current and future harm of human health and welfare created by human-caused (greenhouse gases) is beyond scientific dispute,” the NAS panel of scientists said. “Much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved.” 

In its Massachusetts v EPA decision, the Supreme Court upheld the authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions and held that the agency must determine if greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare by contributing to climate change. In making that determination, the agency was instructed by the Supreme Court to consider the science alone—it could consider costs when issuing regulations to limit those emissions.  

In its proposal, the Trump EPA made up a new argument—one that appears nowhere in the Clean Air Act—that it’s only authorized to regulate “local or regional exposure to dangerous air pollution,” which, in the agency's eyes, does not include “global climate change concerns.” This is preposterous. Indeed, the Clean Air Act expressly mentions “effects on… weather… and climate” as part of the definition of welfare that the EPA is supposed to be protecting. And the Supreme Court specifically found that greenhouse gases are a pollutant if they pose a danger to human health and welfare.  
 
And the EPA’s made-up carve-out is also inconsistent with pollutants that the agency does regulate, such as nitrogen oxides, which affect areas hundreds of miles downwind and causes harm not directly but by forming ozone in reactions with other pollutants. 

Included in the rulemaking repealing, the endangerment finding is also the total elimination of vehicle greenhouse gas emissions standards. Again, this is absurd: Vehicles are the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States. And Trump’s EPA is not just weakening the Biden-era standards—it is eliminating all greenhouse gas vehicle standards, including the first Trump administration’s standards.  
 
Either legally or rhetorically, the Trump administration has tried to argue that emissions from power plants, vehicles, or oil and gas operations are just a small part of overall global emissions. This is a deeply cynical and nihilistic argument—and it is both inaccurate and irrelevant.  
 
In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court said the EPA must determine if greenhouses gases from vehicles “contribute” to climate change. When it comes to climate change, every additional ton matters. If the largest source of emissions in the world’s second-largest emitter doesn’t count, then the obvious question is: What would? For climate deniers, they want to pretend that none of it matters. For the rest of us, that’s not an option.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has desperately tried to make the case that repealing the standards to curb carbon emissions from cars and trucks would save Americans money. But the facts say otherwise.  
 
First off, the 2024 car rules alone would cut nearly eight billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades, more than the entire U.S. economy emits in a year. They would also mean fewer heart attacks, lung illnesses, and asthma attacks, resulting in $13 billion a year in avoided health care costs between 2026 and 2055, according to EPA analysis. In its repeal proposal, the EPA didn’t do its own new analysis and instead tried to just ignore the climate benefits and downplay the health benefits of the 2024 standards. But putting its head in the sand doesn’t mean those benefits don’t exist.   
 
And, even ignoring those benefits, these standards straight up save consumers money. By cutting costs for fueling and repairs, the 2024 EPA car standards would reduce the spending by drivers of new cars by $6,000 over the lifetime of that vehicle. But the Trump EPA skewed its analysis to ignore the very real benefits and inflate the costs.  
 
But even as it put its thumb on the scale, the Trump EPA’s own analysis of the elimination of the vehicle standards found it would increase costs and gas prices, while leading to job losses.  
 
The EPA had to cook the books to get the repeal to appear like a winner: It arbitrarily reduced its prediction of future gasoline prices by $1 a gallon just because; cites a bunch of conflicting research to try and say that car buyers don’t care about long-term fuel savings; and it reverted to earlier costs for making electric vehicles in order to try and argue that electric vehicles are too expensive to make and sell. With the costs of this technology coming down—and with hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles available and increasing in population—these assumptions are absurd.  

So, there you have it: The EPA’s action to toss out the endangerment finding and eliminate clean vehicle standards is wrong on the science, wrong on the law, and wrong for Americans’ pocketbooks. It relies on cooked books and fast talking. But Americans know better. Polling shows they want the federal government to do more—not less—to protect them from the dangers of climate change. This administration should listen to them and drop this cynical plan.