Revoking the Endangerment Finding: A Dangerous Climate Gamble

Erin Araneta

Staff Writer

Record-shattering heat waves, flooded towns, and winter storms packing unprecedented fury have characterized climate change’s recent effects on our planet. But despite climate impacts intensifying globally, U.S. climate policy rollbacks under President Donald Trump have focused on weakening or dismantling regulations that limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles, and industry. Rolling back U.S. climate regulations, especially by targeting the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” represents a dangerous step that undermines science, public health, and global climate diplomacy. 

The EPA’s endangerment finding is the pivotal 2009 scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations by contributing to extreme weather, sea-level rise, respiratory illnesses, and ecosystem collapse. According to The Guardian, the Trump administration has moved to revoke this finding that underpins all federal climate regulations on greenhouse gases. This is not a minor technical tweak, but an attempt to dismantle the scientific and legal foundation for federal climate action, including power plant and vehicle standards.

While the Trump administration touts economic benefits from revoking the endangerment finding, independent analyses reveal significant environmental and financial costs. According to The Guardian, while the EPA states that the move will save the U.S. $1.3 trillion, one analysis from green group Environmental Defense Fund found that the repeal of the endangerment finding would result in as much as 18 billion more tons of plant-warming pollution by 2055 and would impose up to $4.7 trillion in additional expenses tied to harmful climate and air pollution by that time. Taken together, these figures show that any short-term economic gains are far outweighed by long-term harm. Further, according to The Guardian, the U.S. has caused $10 trillion in global damages to the world over the past 30 years. In other words, weakening climate policy only may exacerbate the U.S. has already helped create.

A coalition of states and environmental groups has sued over Trump’s decision to revoke the endangerment finding, arguing it is unlawful and arbitrary, according to Reuters. The move contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas pollution is driving dangerous climate change. These lawsuits highlight the stakes: if the endangerment finding fails, federal agencies lose a key basis for regulating climate pollution from cars, power plants, and oil and gas infrastructure. 

Long before Trump, U.S. policy has harmed the environment for decades through bipartisan support for fossil fuel expansion, weak enforcement, and subsidies. Historic support for highway building and cheap gasoline shows structural drivers of emissions beyond any single president. Trump’s actions are dangerous precisely because they deepen this legacy at the very moment when science demands rapid emissions cuts; instead of correcting past harm, the administration is compounding it. Speaking to Al Jazeera, a policy researcher noted, “While past administrations have modified environmental rules, the second Trump administration is essentially trying to eliminate them entirely.”

The international implications are also prominent here. Scrapping climate-related auto standards would significantly increase planet-warming emissions from the transportation sector, the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gases. According to the New York Times, larger trucks and SUVs are often most profitable in the transportation sector, but if the U.S. wants to compete with Europe or East Asia, it needs to be able to produce E.V.s, says a professor of environmental policies and the transportation sector. Global partners view these moves negatively, with allies seeing them as a major setback for climate leadership. Weakened U.S. credibility in climate negotiations, more space for high-emitting competitors, and heightened climate-related security risks – the U.S. is poised to stand apart from a majority of the world’s industrialized nations.

Dismantling the legal basis for U.S. climate action is environmentally dangerous and geopolitically short-sighted. These rollbacks are choices, not inevitabilities, reversing years of progress built on scientific consensus. Every ton of additional U.S. emissions disproportionately affects communities that did the least to cause the crisis.

Image courtesy of Getty Images.