On one side are decades of mounting scientific evidence, thousands of health experts, a U.S. Supreme Court decision and the reality of a dangerously warming world.
On the other is West Virginia’s chief legal officer, aligning the state in support of the climate change denier that leads his political party and the United States.
West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey is shown on Dec. 13, 2024, at a ceremony at BridgeValley Community & Technical College in South Charleston.
CHRISTOPHER MILLETTE | Gazette-Mail file photo
West Virginia Attorney General John B. “JB” McCuskey has co-led, with Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, a coalition of 26 Republican-led states in a comment letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency supporting its proposed reversal of its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health.
Based on assessments of U.S. and international science advisers, that “Endangerment Finding” has provided the legal underpinning for EPA standards for greenhouse gas emissions that worsen climate change responsible for increasingly extreme weather patterns that have proven economically and environmentally costly in West Virginia. The EPA is proposing to remove all greenhouse gas standards for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and heavy-duty engines.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who — as McCuskey’s predecessor as attorney general — fought Obama and Biden administration efforts to implement more aggressive climate policies, hailed the EPA’s Endangerment Finding attack, in a statement calling the finding “quintessential federal overreach.”
The EPA’s proposal to trash its Endangerment Finding is in line with President Donald Trump’s climate change denialism. Trump claimed without evidence that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion” in a speech Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly.
But last week, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found the EPA’s 2009 finding was “accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence,” noting that research has uncovered additional risks not apparent in 2009.
The NASEM are private, nonprofit, congressionally chartered institutions that give independent analysis to guide public policy in science, engineering and medicine.
The NASEM’s report determined that human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases and resulting climate change harm the health of Americans, with groups such as older adults, people with preexisting health conditions or multiple chronic diseases and outdoor workers disproportionately prone to climate-linked health impacts. Climate-driven changes in precipitation and temperature are leading to negative effects on agricultural crops and livestock, with stress on U.S. energy systems and infrastructure increasing due to climate change, the report said.
Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump greets Lee Zeldin at a campaign event on a Smithton, Pa., farm in September 2024. After his election in November 2024, Trump named Zeldin to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
ALEX BRANDON | Associated Press
The 88-page McCuskey-co-led letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, though, asserts that climate science didn’t support the Endangerment Finding in 2009 and that “the science has only gotten worse for EPA’s original finding since then.”
The attorneys general claim the observation that “greenhouse gas emissions have caused more loss of life and in particular more property damage than storms in the past” is “false.”
Economic and climate data don’t support that claim.
The U.S. experienced one inflation-adjusted billion-dollar disaster every four months in the 1980s, according to the most recent congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, released in 2023 and removed from its original website under the Trump administration. The assessment found that disaster frequency had escalated to one every three weeks on average.
Nearly a quarter of West Virginia’s billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to 2024 (11 out of 45; 24%) came in just the last five years of that span, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.
West Virginia suffered 380 flash flood events from 2019 through 2023, according to NOAA data — an average of one in every 4.8 days.
Those flash flood events marked a 26% increase over the 301 the NOAA recorded in the previous five-year span, a 51% climb over the 252 recorded from the five-year span before that and a 169% rise from the 141 recorded from 2004 through 2008.
West Virginia climate and environmental group leaders signed a letter dated Monday to Zeldin urging him to uphold the EPA’s Endangerment Finding.
“Revoking the Endangerment Finding would ignore overwhelming science and endanger public health,” the letter said.
Tyler Cannon, West Virginia Climate Alliance coordinatorMorgan King, West Virginia Citizen Action Group climate and energy program managerQuenton King, West Virginia Environmental Council presidentJim Kotcon, West Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club chairOlivia Miller, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy program directorDan Shaffer, Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance executive directorJennie Smith, West Virginia Rivers Coalition executive directorLani Wean, West Virginia field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force
Kotcon told the Gazette-Mail that an EPA repeal of its finding would “open the floodgates to nuisance lawsuits” versus fossil fuel companies now shielded due to federal EPA authority to regulate climate pollution.
“If EPA removes that shield, those who are harmed by climate pollution would have no recourse other than to sue the fossil fuel polluters for damages,” Kotcon said.
Wean, the new state field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, told the Gazette-Mail that near her home city of Charleston, she’s watched neighbors’ houses float away in floods, stayed inside for extended periods due to poor air quality and listened in horror to community members who experienced chemical disasters firsthand.
“These impacts on West Virginians due to climate change will only become more frequent and intense without EPA protections from fossil fuel and petrochemical pollution,” Wean said.
W.Va. especially vulnerable as health groups oppose EPA plan
Weighing in against the EPA’s proposed Endangerment Finding repeal before the agency’s public comment period closed Monday night were dozens of national, state and local health organizations.
In a comment letter, national health groups that included the American Lung Association, Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, and National League for Nursing urged the EPA to withdraw its proposal.
The groups noted climate change impacts include worsening air quality and increasing allergen levels, in addition to more heart attacks, strokes and heart failure due to the worsening air quality, with air pollution and wildfire smoke exacerbating cardiovascular diseases.
West Virginia has the nation’s second-highest adult asthma rate, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. It has the highest rate of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, per the American Lung Association.
West Virginia’s heart disease mortality rate is the nation’s seventh-highest, according to CDC data.
“EPA has a legal obligation to protect human health and the environment,” the health groups said in their letter. “This very dangerous proposal fails that obligation and pushes the country backward at a time when the nation urgently needs bold, science-based action to confront the climate crisis.”
A 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, indicated the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that the EPA could not decline to exercise that authority for policy reasons.
Zeldin said in a July 29 news release announcing the EPA’s planned Endangerment Finding repeal the agency was “proposing to end sixteen years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers.”
The EPA claimed in its proposal to rescind its 2009 “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases that “the balance of climate change as a whole appears to skew substantially more than previously recognized by the EPA in the direction of net benefits,” contradicting years of climate science.
The EPA repeatedly cites a U.S. Department of Energy Climate Working Group report submitted to DOE Secretary Chris Wright that asserts that carbon dioxide-induced warming “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
But scientists have said the DOE report relies on climate disinformation, cherry-picking data to undermine climate science established through decades of peer-reviewed research.
W.Va.’s energy-related CO2 emissions rate on long-term climb
Spokespeople for West Virginia’s four members of Congress — Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Shelley Moore Capito, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member and coal magnate Jim Justice, and Reps. Carol Miller and Riley Moore, all Republicans — did not respond to requests for comment. All four have been staunchly supportive of the Zeldin-led EPA in its rollback of environmental standards.
West Virginia has a disproportionately high greenhouse gas emissions rate that raises the stakes for environmental protection — or lack thereof — from the EPA, driven by a clinging to coal that has kept those emissions from dropping as they have in neighboring states.
West Virginia’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions per capita have increased 62.5% from 25.9 metric tons in 1960 to 42.1 in 2023 — the fourth-highest total nationwide below only Wyoming, North Dakota and Alaska, all states with populations less than half of West Virginia’s.
Meanwhile, the U.S. per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rate fell from 16.1 metric tons in 1960 to 14.2 in 2023 — an 11.8% decrease over the same span as West Virginia’s 62.5% increase.
New West Virginia Environmental Council president Quenton King said federal oversight is needed. King doesn’t trust that leaders in West Virginia, by far the country’s most reliant state on coal-fired power, will follow other states in shifting to cleaner energy.
“West Virginians don’t deserve to continue having dirty emitters in their backyards,” King said.
In June, the EPA proposed finding that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants don’t contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.
EPA aims to ax Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program
Under Trump and Zeldin, the EPA has prioritized learning less about industrial greenhouse gas emissions instead of more.
The EPA on Sept. 12 announced a proposed rule to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires reporting of greenhouse gas data and other relevant information from large emission sources, fuel and industrial gas suppliers, and carbon dioxide injection sites.
Roughly 8,000 facilities are required to report their emissions annually, and the reported data are released publicly in October every year. If finalized as proposed, no industries would need to submit reports with 2025 data.
In a September news release, Zeldin asserted the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the EPA’s plan to end the program has provoked pushback from not just environmentalists but industry proponents of companies looking to deploy carbon management technologies.
Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, a nonpartisan carbon management advocacy collaboration of more than 100 companies, labor unions and nonprofits, said the proposed move endangers billions of dollars in investments from U.S. businesses in technologies to manage carbon. Those technologies, Stolark warned, include geologic storage, which has become an increasingly popular option among developers in West Virginia.
John Thompson, technology and markets director at Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit, said in a statement “access to economical levels” of a clean hydrogen production tax credit depends on reliable emissions data and said private investment in hydrogen projects with natural gas and carbon capture are at risk.
Carbon capture, use and sequestration is an umbrella term for technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and uses it to create products or stores it permanently underground.
West Virginia state officials have provided millions of dollars in loans to carbon capture and hydrogen projects in recent years, putting state taxpayers on the hook for technologies deemed at risk under the Trump administration’s attack on the reporting program.
Other nations eye climate goals amid Trump climate denial
Some auto and fossil fuel groups have welcomed the EPA’s aim to ax its Endangerment Finding.
Jason Isaac, CEO of the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Institute, claimed the finding was “scientifically flawed and economically destructive” in a statement.
But world leaders and the United Nations aren’t on the same page on climate as Isaac or the Trump administration. Instead, they’re looking to write a new chapter, announcing new goals to lower greenhouse gas emissions in New York Wednesday despite Trump’s railing against such efforts. Chinese President Xi Jinping said that by 2035 his nation would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10% from their peak.
West Virginia environmentalists want the global push to clean up industry’s act to start at home.
“Every child in West Virginia has the right to breathe clean air,” Wean said, “and be protected from chemical disasters that jeopardize their well-being and future.”