CLIMATEWIRE | One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Donald Trump’s EPA is how it plans to revoke the endangerment finding — the lifeblood of most climate regulations.
Hints about its strategy may have been hiding in plain sight for a month now — ever since EPA announced a slew of deregulatory actions in a single afternoon.
Experts said EPA may be betting that it can upend the scientific finding — which paved the way for the nation’s rules on climate pollution on cars, power plants and across other sectors — without taking direct aim at the overwhelming evidence that greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures.
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Instead EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and other officials whom the president tasked in January with undoing the finding could raise questions about whether a sector — or even the whole country — contributes enough climate pollution globally to warrant regulation.
They may also try to redefine how air pollution can harm the public — a necessary predicate for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
“Maybe they’ll change their mind, but they seem to have an idea of how they want to go about revoking the finding,” said Jeff Holmstead, who served as EPA’s air chief under President George W. Bush.
Jettisoning the endangerment finding could allow the Trump administration to tear out U.S. climate rules by the roots, helping it avoid years of painstaking work to finalize replacement rules that would likely be weaker, according to experts. It would also make it harder for future presidents to regulate other sectors that are contributing to climate change, because the scientific finding would have to be resurrected first.
Experts see hints of that strategy in a relatively detailed press release the agency issued last month, when it announced a barrage of steps it plans to take to roll back climate rules.
Holmstead called the document “very telling.”
He and other experts say the administration may take aim at the cost increases that regulations have on energy and other pillars of Americans’ lives, not at atmospheric science directly. That could allow EPA to skip the cumbersome process of assembling panels of contrarian scientists to build an alternative record on the indisputable link between human emissions and global warming.
“They can probably get it out in the next few months,” Holmstead said of a proposed endangerment finding that focuses on regulatory costs. “They won’t need to spend a lot of time — and Federal Register pages — reviewing the science.”
EPA did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but Zeldin offered new details in a combative press conference last week about how he intends to revise the finding. He said the agency plans to undertake a formal rulemaking process with public comment.
“There isn’t a set timeline here,” Zeldin said, in response to a question by POLITICO’s E&E News. “As we go through the process with regards to the dozens of different actions that we are going to start rulemakings on, they each will follow the Administrative Procedures Act, and we’ll make sure that the actions that we take on everything are as durable as possible.”
That indicates the endangerment finding won’t be killed overnight using an executive order, as Trump effectively did earlier this month on rules requiring showerheads to use less water.
But EPA could still move quickly to revoke the finding.
“It’s going to get done,” said Michael McKenna, an energy lobbyist who led Trump’s transition team at the Department of Energy in 2017. “It’s just a question of when and what it looks like, and how long is it going to take.”
McKenna noted that some people in Trump’s orbit have been thinking about how to revise the endangerment finding for more than 15 years — since it was finalized under President Barack Obama, who issued the first rules based on it.
“If they didn’t have actual text, they had pretty well-developed theories about what it was going to look like,” he said.
Old finding, new costs
The 2009 finding makes two assertions, both of which are prerequisites for Clean Air Act regulation of heat-trapping gases.
One is that six greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare now and in the future. The other is that new motor vehicles contribute greenhouse gases that endanger public health — a finding that has been extended to power plants, oil and gas facilities and other sectors that release climate pollution. The finding stems from a Supreme Court decision in 2007 that determined EPA has the authority to regulate warming gases under the Clean Air Act if it finds that the warming they cause endangers the public.
Conservative lawyers and analysts see room to question Obama-era claims about the extent to which greenhouse gases pose such a danger, even without assailing basic principles of climate science.
That’s especially true for sectors other than transportation. Three administrations have used a section of the Clean Air Act — Section 111 — to regulate climate pollution at power plants and oil and gas facilities. And it requires EPA to determine that a sector “causes, or contributes significantly to harmful air pollution,” before moving to regulate it.
EPA’s endangerment finding missive from March was part of a blitzkrieg of deregulatory actions. But the agency’s willingness to take on the finding — which the first Trump administration opted not to do — got the highest billing.
And EPA made it clear what deficiencies Trump administration officials see in the Obama-era finding that could play a role in overturning it.
“When EPA made the endangerment finding in 2009, the agency did not consider any aspect of the regulations that would flow from it,” the agency said in its telling press release. “EPA’s view then was that the finding itself did not impose any costs, and that EPA could not consider future costs when making the finding.”
But the endangerment finding was the prerequisite for regulations that imposed costs on industry — and Americans — that were not foreseen as part of the Obama administration’s rulemaking.
“Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories,” said Jeff Clark, who oversees regulatory review at the White House, in the March statement.
If EPA decides to make costs a cornerstone of its endangerment finding revision, it could ratchet down the social cost of greenhouse gases — as it did in Trump’s first term — and use it to show that the environmental benefits of regulation are dwarfed by economic costs. It could also seek to quantify economic benefits from deregulation — or even from warmer temperatures — and balance those against a diminished assessment of climate damages.
But Vicki Arroyo, who served as EPA policy chief under former President Joe Biden, said the time to weigh the costs and benefits of a specific rule comes later on — when EPA is proposing the regulation.
“The endangerment finding should just be about whether or not the science is compelling and shows that the greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and therefore cause an endangerment to human health and the environment,” said Arroyo, who is a professor at Georgetown Law School. “How costly or cost effective it might be to address those emissions, that’s a later question that relates to, ‘What are you going to do about it?'”
‘Changing the subject’
The March press release also took the Obama EPA to task for its “flawed and unorthodox” decision to group all six greenhouse gases together when assessing the danger they pose to human health. And it questioned whether individual categories of emissions, like cars, require their own endangerment finding for each gas.
This might indicate that EPA is preparing to argue that individual U.S. economic sectors need their own findings to assess their contribution to global climate change. EPA might assert that their contribution isn’t large enough to pose a danger — undermining any justification for regulations.
“The EPA might end up agreeing that humans are contributing significantly to observed warming globally. But the United States isn’t alone,” said Patrick Traylor, who served as EPA deputy assistant administrator for compliance in the first Trump administration. “So, I mean, the EPA might decide not to make endangerment policy based on U.S. emissions alone.”
“Or the EPA might slice that even finer and say, ‘Well, maybe even if domestic contributions could be viewed as a significant forcer of observed warming, this industry, that sector, each individually, can’t be,’” said Traylor, who’s now a partner in the environmental and natural resources practice at Vinson & Elkins.
But Joe Goffman, who served as EPA air chief under Biden, said focusing on a narrower set of carbon sources would give a false sense that regulations are always futile, because single sources will always contribute only a sliver of global emissions.
“Just because one pollutant from one particular source interacts with other pollutants from other sources to create the problem, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t contribute to the problem,” he said.
The EPA press release said the time was ripe for a review of whether U.S. efforts at adaptation and mitigation had made the country less vulnerable to climate change.
But Goffman called that “a massive exercise in changing the subject.”
“Everything cited in the March announcement goes to whether or not regulatory action is justifiable or preferable, not to whether or not these molecules operate in the atmosphere in a particular way,” he said.
“Because it’s a much harder question, isn’t it, to say ‘Yes, these gases cause a threat to public health and the environment, but we don’t want to act on that.’”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
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