EPA rescinds rule regulating greenhouse gas emissions

The Trump administration announced Thursday that it was repealing the Endangerment Finding, the foundational science behind the Clean Air Act, in what EPA head Lee Zeldin called the largest deregulatory act in U.S. history.

The 2009 finding had declared that the pollutants emitted whenever fossil fuels are burned endanger public health and the environment.

Now, the EPA is arguing that it does not have the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2.

The agency has also repealed standards that limit heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, the nation’s largest source of those emissions.

Jack Shapiro of the Natural Resource Council of Maine said the decision is “divorced from overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“If the federal government is interested in protecting people’s health and safety, then they should be operating using the best science, and this decision that they’ve made today couldn’t be further from that approach,” he said.

Over a dozen Maine-based environmental groups have spoken out against the decision, as has Gov. Janet Mills, who said in a statement that Maine is particularly vulnerable to air pollution that flows here from other states.

“Maine is also grappling with increasingly frequent and severe storms that will only worsen from unchecked climate pollution, which threatens the health of Maine people, our environment, and our economy,” she said.

Public health groups have also expressed concern that rolling back greenhouse gas emissions limits for cars will increase premature deaths and hospital visits from increased air pollution.

Shapiro said the move will also open up an unproductive and chaotic state-by-state regulatory landscape.

“The role of the federal government here is, is really critical,” he said. “I don’t think that we actually want to have 50 different sets of state policies and state regulations on some of these really important things, like our power sector and power plants, like our auto industry.”

Several national environmental groups have vowed to sue the Trump administration over the decision.