Trump EPA Begins Reconsideration Of Whether Greenhouse Gases Endanger Public Health, Identifying Industry Discomfort With Earlier Finding As Sufficient New Evidence

WASHINGTON. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday announced that the agency would formally reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, the foundational scientific determination by which the federal government concluded that greenhouse gases harm human health and welfare, identifying as the basis for reconsideration a sustained, sixteen-year discomfort with the finding among the industries it had been used to regulate.

The endangerment finding, issued in response to the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, established the legal predicate under which the federal government could regulate carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Reconsidering the finding, agency officials clarified, would not entail reconsidering whether greenhouse gases trap heat, whether human emissions have raised atmospheric concentrations, or whether the resulting warming damages human health, three matters the administration acknowledged remained settled. It would, rather, reconsider whether any of that should continue to be the federal government's problem.

"The endangerment finding has held back American energy for far too long," Mr. Zeldin said in a video posted to social media, in which he described the action as the largest deregulatory step in EPA history, while standing in front of a podium that did not specify what new science had been received since 2009 to warrant reopening the question. The administrator characterized the move as part of an effort to remove what he called "the climate change religion," a phrase that several administration officials described as a useful way of categorizing all assessments produced by federal climate scientists, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon's intelligence directorate, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Meteorological Organization, and most major insurance underwriters.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the reconsideration had been requested in detail by oil and gas trade associations during the transition, that the legal architecture had been drafted in coordination with Project 2025 contributors at the Heritage Foundation, and that the timing reflected a desire to deliver a signature deregulatory action before the second-term tariff agenda began absorbing the news cycle. "There is broad scientific consensus," the official said, "that this is what the donors wanted."

The practical effect, environmental lawyers noted, would be to subject every existing federal greenhouse gas regulation to fresh legal challenge in courts increasingly populated by judges who had argued, prior to confirmation, that the original finding was overly expansive. Among the rules whose legal foundation would be opened to attack were vehicle emissions standards, power plant rules, methane rules, and the federal social cost of carbon, the figure agencies use to weigh the dollar value of climate damage when issuing any rule, which under the second-term review had already been adjusted from $51 per ton to a value officials described as "to be determined, possibly zero."

Climate scientists at the agency, several of whom had spent the morning preparing for layoffs scheduled for later in the week, declined to comment on the record, citing concerns about retaliation, the active rescission of their grants, and the fact that the planet had, in the period between the finding's issuance and its reconsideration, experienced its ten hottest years on record.

At press time, EPA officials confirmed that any future federal climate rule would be required to demonstrate, under the new framework, that greenhouse gases had become more harmful than they had been the day before.