Trump rescinds long-standing EPA rule curbing greenhouse emissions

President Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency will no longer regulate greenhouse gases emitted from cars, trucks and power plants, rescinding the legal finding it used for nearly two decades to advance a climate change agenda.

The move, which repealed what’s long been known as “the endangerment finding,” will radically transform most U.S. policies regarding climate change. Since 2009, the EPA has used it as the legal and scientific basis for the government to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

“We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy,” Mr. Trump said at a White House news conference. “This determination had no basis in fact — none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law.”

“On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world,” Mr. Trump said.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the move “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.”

Environmental groups slammed the move, saying it endangers both the planet and human health. The Sierra Club called it “a brazen assault on the health and welfare of the American public.”

“The Trump administration is making it their official policy that our lives, our health, and our future are of no importance to them, only polluter profits. Climate change is wreaking havoc right now, destroying communities and endangering our lives. Instead of fighting it, Donald Trump is instead just focused on helping corporate polluters profit,” Sierra Club Executive Director Loren Blackford said in a statement.

The White House has argued that the endangerment finding is unnecessarily expensive and hampered America’s energy independence. It estimates revoking the rule would save the public roughly $1.3 trillion, partly by making new vehicles cheaper, predicting the cost of a light-duty car, truck or SUV would decline by as much as $2,400.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas and said the harms associated with climate change are “serious and well recognized,” which led to the agency’s creation of the endangerment finding two years later.

It soon became the basis for the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas as a pollutant.

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump rolled back regulations on emissions, calling climate change a “con job.” He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and canceled nearly $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects. A federal judge later restored some of that funding.