One day before an anticipated White House announcement on rescinding a key tool in the fight against climate change, officials in Easton said the federal government is moving in the wrong direction.
“Climate change is real, it’s not a hoax,” Mayor Sal Panto Jr. said during a news conference Wednesday in City Hall. “It’s happening today.”
Panto along with state Rep. Robert Freeman and local advocates for clean transportation and public health called for more, not less, regulation of truck pollution standards and a move toward electric vehicles.
The Trump administration on Thursday will revoke a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to fight climate change through regulating greenhouse gas emissions, the White House announced.
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding. That Obama-era policy determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will “formalize the rescission of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding” at a White House ceremony, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
The action “will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” she said. The bulk of the savings will stem from reduced costs for new vehicles, with the EPA projecting average per vehicle savings of more than $2,400 for popular light-duty cars, SUVs and trucks, Leavitt said.
The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.
It is used to justify regulations, such as auto emissions standards, intended to protect against threats made increasingly severe by climate change — deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.
Legal challenges are certain for any action that effectively would repeal those regulations, with environmental groups describing the shift as the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal efforts to address climate change.
Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. addresses a news conference Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026, in City Hall warning of pollution and health impacts resulting from a federal rollback of greenhouse gas policy alongside, from left, state Rep. Robert Freeman, Shannon Crooker and Mary Ellen O’Connell.Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com
The Pennsylvania director of Generation180, an advocacy group fighting climate change, cited the impacts on Lehigh Valley air quality from the proliferation of warehouses served largely by diesel-powered trucks.
“In our Clearing the Air report, we found that nearly 70,000 children across Pennsylvania attend school or play within 500 meters of a major trucking corridor,” the director, Shannon Crooker, said. “This exposes them to toxic diesel exhaust, linked to acute and chronic health concerns including asthma, reduced lung function, developmental delays, cardiovascular stress and increased cancer risk.”
It’s a public health issue and a budget issue, she said, with these “long-term health impacts that families and school districts end up paying for.”
EPA guidance on diesel emissions released Feb. 3 notes the agency “is committed to keeping the protection of air quality and human health at the forefront of every action the agency takes.”
“At Generation180, we’re working to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles from light to heavy duty and mid-sized vehicles, including electric school buses,” Crooker said.
Mary Ellen O’Connell, a registered nurse with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, said studies already show “a chronic-asthma epidemic” in the Lehigh Valley. In its annual Asthma Capitals Report, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America has for years ranked the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ Metropolitan Statistical Area among the most challenging areas in the United States for people living with asthma.
“I would invite all of you to take a moment and think about people in your family, people in your workplace, people in your social circle, your neighborhood,” she said. “How many people do you know that are pregnant, have asthma, have COPD, have emphysema?”
Freeman, D-Northampton, accused the Trump administration of “willful disregard of the reality that is climate change.”
He called for enactment of House Bill 1539 to pay for more electric school buses, and more federal support.
“We need a renewed federal-state partnership to address the serious problem of air pollution,” he said. “Pennsylvania is making progress in low and zero emission vehicle adoption, but we cannot work in a vacuum created by the federal government’s rescinding of vital clean air funding.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.