Washington — The administration of President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the repeal of a scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, removing the legal basis for federal climate regulations.
Trump, speaking in the Oval Office, called the repeal “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.” The move — signaled last year by the Trump administration — will eliminate all prior Environmental Protection Agency regulations on climate pollutants from motor vehicles.
Those were the last remaining climate rules on the U.S. auto industry, which is responsible for about a quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data.
The administration has also flattened miles-per-gallon targets to levels the industry already meets, removed fines for missing those targets and nixed influential state-level rules that would have mandated increased electric vehicle sales into the next decade.
The president suggested his latest action will “eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. You’re going to get a better car. You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.”
The Detroit Three automakers and their competitors have already responded to Trump-era policy changes over the past year by shifting resources away from plug-in models and toward gas-powered ones, which tend to be short-term profit drivers in the United States. Brands have also promised to roll out more affordably priced models in the coming years as politicians from both parties increasingly discuss cost-of-living concerns.
Still, some in the industry have previously expressed skepticism over gutting the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Ford Motor Co. was among those skeptics in a round of regulatory filings last year.
“(The Trump administration) proposes to eliminate all vehicle GHG emissions standards. To be sure, current standards are not aligned with customer choice and market realities. They need to be eased, and we therefore welcome the EPA’s important efforts in this direction,” wrote Cynthia Williams, Ford’s global director of sustainability, homologation and compliance.
“But pragmatically, eliminating standards altogether is not likely to provide the industry with the long-term stability we need to make historic investments in America and compete globally.”
E2, a clean energy business group, raised similar concerns about stability and predicted additional fallout. “This decision will drive up costs for businesses and consumers and weaken our economy. It upends nearly two decades of commonsense policy,” said Sandra Purohit, thr group’s federal advocacy director.
She continued: “It injects huge uncertainty into the marketplace. It discourages capital investment and innovation in the auto industry. And it ignores the economic costs of extreme weather that’s only made worse by rising GHG pollution — including disaster clean-up, higher insurance premiums, lost productivity, and supply chain disruption.”
View from Detroit
Many automakers and industry groups have backed the repeal of stringent vehicle emission standards, but they have been reluctant to show public support for rescinding the endangerment finding because of the legal and regulatory uncertainty it could unleash.
Carefully worded statements following the Thursday announcement showed that reluctance. Ford, notably, made no reference to its recent position on the endangerment finding in a company statement.
“We appreciate the work of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin to address the imbalance between current emissions standards and customer choice,” company spokesperson Dave Tovar said in a statement. “Ford has consistently advocated for a single, stable national standard that aligns with customer choice, the market, societal benefit, and American job growth.”
General Motors Co. never filed a regulatory comment regarding the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding,” instead deferring to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the industry’s top lobbying group in Washington. The company deferred to the group again on Thursday.
John Bozzella, president and CEO of the trade organization, pointed out that the administration’s latest action was “consistent with EPA’s earlier announcement” but did not say whether he agreed with the new policy.
“I’ve said it before: Automotive emissions regulations finalized in the previous administration are extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace demand for EVs,” he added. “The auto industry in America remains focused on preserving vehicle choice for consumers, keeping the industry competitive, and staying on a long-term path of emissions reductions and cleaner vehicles.”
Stellantis NV, formerly Fiat Chrysler, was previously mum on the subject in the lead-up to Thursday’s announcement. The transatlantic automaker submitted a comment lobbying for lenient regulations, but did not directly take a position on the underlying question of whether the EPA should be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases in the first place.
The company, known for its muscle cars and big trucks, eventually backed the policy change on Thursday.
“Stellantis welcomes today’s decision, because it enables us to continue offering Americans a broad range of cars, trucks and SUVs — including BEVs, REEVs, hybrids and efficient internal combustion engines — that they want, need and can afford. We remain supportive of a rational, achievable approach on fuel economy standards that preserves our customers’ freedom of choice,” the automaker said in a statement.
Trump on climate
Beyond autos, the Trump administration’s move represents its most sweeping climate change policy rollback to date, after a string of regulatory cuts and other moves intended to unfetter fossil fuel development and stymie the rollout of clean energy.
Trump has said he believes climate change is a hoax, and has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, leaving the world’s largest historic contributor to global warming out of international efforts to combat it.
The endangerment finding was first adopted by the United States in 2009 under former President Barack Obama. The finding led the EPA to take action under the Clean Air Act of 1963 to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and four other heat-trapping air pollutants from vehicles, power plants and other industries.
Obama denounced Trump’s move in a social media post: “Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules. Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money.
Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA administrator, said that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are free to act if they want more stringent climate regulations.
“If Congress wants EPA to regulate the heck out of greenhouse gases emitted from motor vehicles, then Congress can clearly make that the law, which they haven’t done for good reason,” he said in the Oval Office. “Today, we dismantle the tactics and legal gymnastics used by the Obama and Biden administrations to backdoor their ideological agendas on the American people.”
The endangerment finding repeal will remove the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse gas emission standards for cars, but may not initially apply to stationary sources such as power plants, officials told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
Further details on whether Thursday’s repeal will apply to stationary sources were not immediately available following the announcement. The transportation and power sectors are each responsible for around a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas output, according to EPA figures.
Asked what he’d say to Americans concerned about the public health implications of the policy change, Trump brushed the question aside.
“I tell them don’t worry about it, because this has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam,” he said. “They’ll have more money to spend for health care.”
Experts, environmentalists weigh in
Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA official under former President George W. Bush, downplayed the immediate impacts of a repeal ahead of the announcement.
“Revoking the endangerment finding will immediately eliminate all greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles, but vehicle makers have very long planning cycles, and the revocation of the endangerment finding won’t have much practical impact in the near term,” said Holmstead, now a partner at the law firm Bracewell LLP.
He also suggested that the endangerment finding had minimal impact on reducing automotive emissions over the past two decades, thanks to jagged political swings in Washington.
He added: “(T)his might actually force Congress to get involved in reaching a bipartisan agreement on actual climate change legislation — probably not during the Trump Administration, but the business community would like to have the long-term certainty that would come with bipartisan legislation.”
Other legal experts said the EPA policy reversal could, for example, lead to a surge in lawsuits known as “public nuisance” actions, a pathway that had been blocked following a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that GHG regulation should be left in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency instead of the courts.
“This may be another classic case where overreach by the Trump administration comes back to bite it,” said Robert Percival, a University of Maryland environmental law professor.
Environmental groups have slammed the repeal as a danger to the climate and vowed to fight any final action in court.
“The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis, and a devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters.”
“But this isn’t going to stand without a fight,” she added. “We will be seeing them in court — and we are going to win.”
Depending on the outcomes of legal challenges from the NRDC and allied groups, future U.S. administrations seeking to regulate greenhouse gas emissions likely would need to reinstate the endangerment finding, a task that could be politically and legally complex.
Some environmental lawyers have suggested seeking remedies at the state level.
“If I were the state of California and the endangerment finding gets rescinded, I would argue that there are no federal standards,” Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former Biden administration official, told Heatmap News in August.
She argued that without federal regulations, states would no longer be preempted from pursuing their own greenhouse gas rules.
“I don’t know if that’s a winner,” Carlson said. “But I think it’s worth a try.”
Reuters contributed.
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