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The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit over its decision to deregulate emissions and repeal a landmark scientific finding that linked greenhouse gases to human health problems, forming the basis of policies to address climate change.
It was filed Wednesday in Washington, D.C., appellate court by a group of 17 health and environmental organizations and specifically names the Environmental Protection Agency and its administrator Lee Zeldin as defendants. Their petition asks the court to review the EPA’s recent rollback of fundamental steps taken by United States leaders to curb fossil fuel pollution for most of the last two decades.
The American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association and the Environmental Defense Fund are among the nonprofit groups included in the coalition that filed the complaint. In it, they argued that the move by President Trump and Zeldin last week to eliminate restrictions on pollution from sources that the scientific community has long pinpointed as the major drivers of climate change — like the tailpipes of cars, trucks, airplanes and power plants — is illegal.
“With this action, EPA flips its mission on its head,” said Hana Vizcarra, an attorney at Earthjustice, which is another nonprofit involved in the new lawsuit, in a statement. “It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment and to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so.”
Deregulating tailpipe emissions in the U.S. acted as a formal repeal of the “endangerment finding,” a crucial scientific and legal framework developed under the Obama administration in 2009. It found that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane pose threats to human health and welfare, after they are released into the atmosphere during the combustion processes that create energy by burning fossil fuels.
The finding allowed policymakers to crack down on fossil fuel usage and hazardous emissions nationwide as part of the Clean Air Act, which historically required the EPA to regulate air pollution levels generated by vehicles. Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA has said it intended to publish a conflicting finding that greenhouse gas emissions from sources like power plans “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution,” despite the fact that the agency’s own data showed in 2023 that the power industry produced the second-highest concentration of emissions from burning fossil fuels compared with any other sector.
However, Zeldin partially reiterated that stance on emissions standards in an interview with CBS News after last week’s deregulation announcement, saying gas-powered engines “have advanced so much over the last couple of decades” and may not have the pollutant effects that they did before the “endangerment finding” came into play.
Both he and Mr. Trump argued that relaxing emissions regulations will improve the U.S. economy. But critics say it may in fact have the opposite effect, potentially driving up gas prices and raising costs of vehicles themselves.
