President Donald Trump’s administration has officially put Americans on notice that it will be doing nothing to address climate change. Actually, worse than nothing, the Environmental Protection Agency also announced that it will soon be taking back everything it had done to date to address the biggest source of climate pollution in the country.

Specifically, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, is proposing to reverse the “endangerment finding” that is the predicate for rules requiring polluting industries to rein in their greenhouse gas emissions. To hear Zeldin tell it, he is exposing some elaborate, bureaucratic ruse to bilk taxpayers. In fact, the endangerment finding is a simple affirmation that greenhouse gas pollution is causing climate change and therefore endangering people. And, of course, it sits atop a mountain of scientific evidence.

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As a lawyer who has been working on climate change for the last 20 years, it’s hard to overstate how much it changed everything when the EPA finally recognized the scientific consensus and took meaningful action to tackle greenhouse gas pollution from cars at last. 

A quick history: By the 1990s, the terrifying inaction of the U.S. government was driving an ambitious push to compel the EPA to act. In 1999, a group of environmental organizations petitioned the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles. The EPA denied the petition primarily on grounds that greenhouse gases were not pollutants within the scope of the Clean Air Act. The petitioners took the EPA to court, and in 2007, the case made its way up to the Supreme Court. In the landmark decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, the court ruled that greenhouse gases are indeed pollutants that the EPA has the authority to regulate and the obligation to regulate if, in the EPA’s judgment, they endanger human health and welfare. 

Once the EPA was required to make that judgment, it had to face up to the climate science that was by then incontrovertible. In 2009, the EPA found that “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.” Based on this finding, the EPA began setting standards for tailpipes, power plants, and oil and gas fields — the big three when it comes to greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S.

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It is a point of pride at Earthjustice, where I am privileged to work, that we were part of the legal team that litigated Mass v. EPA, along with several subsequent cases concerning the EPA’s authority to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. Over time, the Supreme Court had several opportunities to backtrack, but it never did. Instead, the court repeatedly affirmed the decision that our national clean air statute is capacious enough to address the biggest pollution threat ever.

At this advanced stage of the climate crisis, there is every reason not to revisit well-settled law, much less question the scientific consensus about climate change that we can all witness for ourselves. But unconscionably, that is exactly what Zeldin and the Trump administration are trying to do.

It has not even been a month since flash floods took the lives of 135 people including 37 children in the Texas Hill Country. In June, nearly 130 million people were under advisories for dangerously extreme heat. Midwest tornadoes in March: 47 people dead. January: Apocalyptic wildfires that Los Angeles is still reeling from. In the first half of this year alone, there were 15 climate disasters in the U.S. that each caused over a billion dollars in damage — and those are just the losses that can be monetized. And, yes, we know that climate change played a role in these disasters.

How is it possible that the Environmental Protection Agency is telling us that we aren’t endangered now? To observe the pain that millions of Americans are suffering and officially shrug it off — well, it’s an epic level of gaslighting. 

Alongside the cruelty, there is also a cold calculus. If the EPA is able to revoke the endangerment finding for cars and trucks, we expect that it will try to move quickly to rescind all of the other regulations that are premised on the finding. Tuesday’s move is the next step in the Trump administration’s intentionally lawless strategy to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. 

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Have no fear that any of this will go unchallenged. Smart lawyers are preparing to go to court, and the lawsuits will hit as soon as this decision is final. In the meantime, you don’t have to be a lawyer to know how wrong this is. 

Abigail Dillen is the President of Earthjustice, the world’s largest nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.